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Bob Dylan: Bringing it All Back Home

Bob Dylan: Bringing it All Back Home

Mobile Fidelity  UDSACD 2096

Stereo Hybrid

Pop/Rock


Bob Dylan - Bringing it All Back Home


Dylan’s 1965 Landmark Blows Up Boundaries, Styles, Practicalities: Rock Music Becomes its Own Art Form

Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home represents the moment that pop and rock music became their own art form, expressions finally treated with the same seriousness and respect as classical and jazz. Incalculably influential, the 1965 landmark established myriad benchmarks in songwriting, sound, artwork, and performance. It served the world notice that Dylan was no longer just the virtuoso visionary tuned into the wants of the folk community. It’s a disarming broadcast that declares Dylan’s surroundings and personality, and those of his audiences, whether they knew it or not, drastically changed.

As part of its Bob Dylan catalog restoration series, w are thoroughly humbled to have the privilege of mastering the iconic album from the original master tapes and making it available on hybrid SACD. The end result is the very finest, most transparent digital stereo edition of Bringing It All Back Home ever produced. Forever renowned for its organic sound, the album’s you-are-there-presence is fantastically enhanced on this superb version, with SACD's music-enhancing technology affording playback of previously buried information.

The sonics are so realistic, balanced, and tonally accurate that acoustic guitars resonate with the woody decay they do as when you strum them on your lap. Equally vivid are the textures of the drum skins, amplified pitch of the electric guitars, and ambient hum of the interior space of Columbia’s Studio B. Both the plugged-in and acoustic sides claim a discerning level of microdynamics, spaciousness, imaging, and warmth that will send even the most rabid Dylan fan into a tizzy. And what better record to cause such enthusiastic reactions?

More than 45 years after its release, Bringing It All Back Home continues to come on like a prophetic transmission from a savant who’s privy to cerebral viewpoints, mental transferences, and “thought dreams” elusive to everyone but him. With the flipside of the album, Dylan strings together four of the most unflinching, forward-reaching, and boundary-breaking acoustic-based compositions ever played. In addressing liberating psychedelia, lost innocence, institutional naiveté, and tarnished relationships, respectively, Dylan constructs a compositional quartet/suite that functions as metaphor for his waving goodbye to political folk music’s imprisoning rules and bounding restrictiveness—and a rough guide to the transcendental poetry, shape-shifting vocal phrasing, and alternate tunings he now embraced.

Side One remains one of the boldest cohesive artistic statements ever assembled. Dylan, forever throwing down the gauntlet to detractors and narrow-minded fans, plugging in with a band and kicking it all off with the in-your-face hootenanny “Subterranean Homesick Blues” before romping, slashing, and rolling through “Maggie’s Farm,” another fun albeit caustic indictment of homogenous thought and bohemian method. Dylan’s attitude undergoes a self-awakening metamorphosis, his lyrical scope broadened, his hallucinogenic interests increased, his willingness to embrace paradoxes and shake them out with mind-convulsing aptitude in line with his progression towards bizarre imagery.

Ranked 31 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Bringing It All Back Home marks the moment when paradigms permanently shifted, preexisting standards fell, and fresh aural, poetic, and sonic dialects came to fore. Albums don’t come more vetted. You deserve to experience it in the finest-possible quality.

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13 of 13 recommend this, would you recommend it?  yes | no

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Recording
Analogue recording
Tracks
1. Subterranean Homesick Blues
2. She Belongs To Me
3. Maggie’s Farm
4. Love Minus Zero/No Limit
5. Outlaw Blues
6. On the Road Again
7. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream
8. Mr. Tambourine Man
9. Gates of Eden
10. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
11. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Comments (3)

Comment by Mark Powers - October 17, 2015 (1 of 3)

This is a super good stereo disc. I purchased this as I wanted to compare to the Columbia surround disc. Not sure what to say except they are both great, and of course carry a different sonic quality.
The question is what will be my go to disc? The stereo or the multichannel? Not sure, glad to have both but I might lean towards the stereo, not because of sq, but because of easier to listen to, I don't have to engage as much.

Comment by Downunderman - October 15, 2021 (2 of 3)

Issued in 2012 and Mastered by Shawn R. Britton.

This edition is mastered from the "original master tape" but it's a remixed "master tape" created in 2003 by Michael H. Brauer using the original 4 track multi tape from 1965. The remix was done for the 2003 Columbia SACD when it was determined that the existing 'master tape' was no longer usable. In doing so I understand Mr. Breuer's brief was to recreate the original stereo mix from 1965 for what was to become the new 'original' master tape.

With that in mind it is perhaps unsurprising that the MoFi stereo SACD is not a marked improvement over the well regarded 2003 Columbia SACD. A little more natural sounding and organic, but not much more.

The average DR's are pretty much the same too - 12 for the Columbia and 11 for the MoFi.

I have not heard the MoFi SACD mono version issued in 2016, but the weight of comparative opinion I have seen leans towards the stereo version as the better overall listen. The average DR for the mono sitting at 10.

Comment by Ben Leggett - November 23, 2021 (3 of 3)

This one follows the pattern of the other Dylan stereo MoFis - less shrill and with a less forward midrange/vocal mix than the comparable Columbia SACD, making it much easier and less fatiguing to listen to over time.

There's no reason to own the Columbias if you have these - even if you care about multichannel.