Bob Dylan (SuperVinyl)

Description

The Understated Debut That Launched a Peerless Career: Bob Dylan Is the Clearest Connection to the Singer-Songwriters Folk Roots
Pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl for Reference Playback: Mobile Fidelity 33RPM SuperVinyl Mono LP Features the Direct Sound Dylan Intended

1/4 / 15 IPS analog mono master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe

Bob Dylans self-titled 1962 debut is as understated of an entrance as any significant musician as ever made. Well-versed in American roots music, Dylan simultaneously pays homage to tradition and extends it by putting his own stamp on classic material that metaphorically functions as the soil of contemporary songs and styles. Free of ego, and performed with masterful conviction, Bob Dylan ranks with the initial efforts of giants like Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones.

Nodding to Woody Guthrie and re-imagining Blind Lemon Jeffersons See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, Dylan straddles the past and future. He authoritatively displays the ability to handle weighty topics such as death, sorrow, and lamentation with the vaudeville flair, bluesy mannerisms, and poignant command of an artist three times his then-20-year-old age.

Sourced from the original master tapes, housed in a Stoughton jacket, and pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl at Fidelity Record Pressing, Mobile Fidelitys numbered-edition 180g 33RPM mono SuperVinyl LP brings the contents of this seminal release as close as theyve ever come to live-in-the-studio quality. Transparent to the source, Dylans voice, acoustic guitar, and harmonica come across with exceptional realism the husk and bark to which Robert Shelton referred in his legendary New York Times review of a Dylan appearance at Gerdes Folk City courtesy of the formats nearly non-existent noise floor, groove definition, and quiet surfaces.

Heard in the original mono configuration, Dylans vocals are in the heart of the musical action and as one with the accompaniment. This reissue paints an incredibly accurate portrait of the concrete mass of sound that features no artificial panning and offers a straight-ahead immersion into the music producer John Hammond recorded in just two days in November 1961.

Though much has been made of the commercial indifference that greeted the album upon its low-key release, focusing on sales figures and the reaction of a public not yet hip to Dylans name miss the forest for the trees. Distinguished from the eras other folk efforts by way of the singer-songwriters determination, brazenness, and lived-through-this worldliness, Bob Dylan lays the groundwork for the path hed soon trailblaze and everyone else would follow.

As Dylan scholar and pop-culture critic Greil Marcus observed in 2010: Everybody knew Joan Baez and the Kingston Trio; if you knew Bob Dylan, you knew something other people didnt, something that soon enough everybody had to know. Within a year, an album could put an adjective in front of the singers name as if it were already common coin.

Mono is how almost everyone first heard Dylans opening salvo. A career like none other starts here.

MoFi SuperVinyl:

Developed by NEOTECH and RTI, MoFi SuperVinyl is the most exacting-to-specification vinyl compound ever devised. Analog lovers have never seen (or heard) anything like it. Extraordinarily expensive and extremely painstaking to produce, the special proprietary compound addresses two specific areas of improvement: noise floor reduction and enhanced groove definition. The vinyl composition features a new carbonless dye (hold the disc up to the light and see) and produces the worlds quietest surfaces. This high-definition formula also allows for the creation of cleaner grooves that are virtually indistinguishable from the original lacquer. MoFi SuperVinyl provides the closest approximation of what the labels engineers hear in the mastering lab.