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TAS Rated 5/5 Music, 4/5 Sonics in the October 2019 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

Limited to Just 9000 Hand-Numbered Copies!
MoFi SuperVinyl Pressing!


Mastered from the Original Master Tapes with Mobile Fidelity's One-Step Process: Blood On The Tracks UD1S 180g 45RPM 2LP Box Set the Ultimate Analog Version

Lavish Packaging Includes Opulent Box, Foil-Stamped Jackets, and SuperVinyl LPs: Deluxe Audiophile Pressing Strictly Limited to 9,000 Hand-Numbered Copies

Ranked #16 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Includes "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Simple Twist of Fate": Dylan Pours Out Scarred Emotion, Opens His Veins, and Bleeds

Bob Dylan was at several crossroads in the mid 1970s. Artistically, he was largely written off as being past his prime. Emotionally, he was suffering through a painful divorce from his then-wife Sara Lowndes. Creatively, he appeared at a stalemate, his previous decade's unprecedented run of transformational brilliance finished. Then came Blood on the Tracks. A start-to-finish cycle that documents a lover's pursuit of, entanglement with, and loss of a woman, the bracingly intimate 1975 effort remains one of the most encompassing break-up albums ever made and ranks as the most personal statement of the Bard's career.

Presenting the record's acoustic and band-supported songs with the utmost transparency, dynamics, presence, immediacy, spaciousness, and imaging, Mobile Fidelity's opulent UD1S (UltraDisc One-Step) box set makes Blood on the Tracks reach three-dimensional sonic and emotional heights never before attained. Strictly limited to 9,000 numbered copies and pressed at RTI on SuperVinyl, this ultra-hi-fi collector's edition shines a high-powered light on the fluid vocal phrasing, timbral shifts, functional rhythms, and inward-looking strumming crucial to the album's aura. You'll enjoy deep-black backgrounds, boundless soundstaging, pointillist details, staggering dynamics, and arguably, the most lifelike tonalities and nuances ever committed to vinyl. Every note, breath, and movement is reproduced with exquisite accuracy, wowing clarity, and impeccable balance.

The lavish packaging and beautiful presentation of Mobile Fidelity's Blood on the Tracks UD1S pressing befit its extremely select status. Housed in a deluxe box, the collectible version contains special foil-stamped jackets and faithful-to-the-original graphics that illuminate the splendor of the recording. Aurally and visually, it exists a curatorial artifact meant to be preserved, poured over, touched, and examined. It is made for discerning listeners that prize sound quality and creativity, and who desire to fully immerse themselves in the art – and everything involved with the album, from the images to the textures and liner notes.

Ranked 16 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and replete with existential thought, piercing directness, raw singing, and majestic arrangements, Blood on the Tracks remains a soul-exposing confessional. To hear it is to experience the agony, frustration, trauma, highs, lows, confusion, sadness, and, ultimately, requisite redemption associated with intimate relationships gone astray. Dylan maintains it's a work of fiction, but the evident close-vested autobiographical premise is what helps make it universal: It's the icon singing through tears, going out of his mind, battling hallowing emptiness, firing shots across the bow, and accepting culpability. Blood on the Tracks serves, in short, as a consummate expression of love's darker sides and the consequences of what happens when dreams unravel.

For all the melancholic pain, unresolved questions, shattered memories, wasted times, unrequited dialogs, and weary regret within, Blood on the Tracks remains as daring as it is reflective. Rather than follow for a monotone caustic vibe, Dylan's songs burrow into the subconscious for the manners in which they are even-keeled, mellow, and occasionally, even peaceful. Dignity, honor, poignancy, and fairness – all traits uncommon in any situation in which partners dissolve histories, change hearts, and attribute blame – instill the record with equilibrium on par with the consistency of the flowing melodies.

Throughout, tunes come on and proceed as if they could continue forever, Dylan spinning poetic verses and conversations amidst finely tied knots of acoustic notes, chords, and fills, the deceivingly simple architecture conjuring the intertwined refractions of a bezeled jewel, various angles, colors, and textures conjoining into a gorgeously inseparable whole. Backed by Tony Brown's flexible albeit subtle bass, Buddy Cage's country-streaked pedal-steel guitar, and Paul Griffin's soul-baring organ – an instrument used to shadow, tuckpoint, and illuminate here as effectively as any time in rock history – Dylan pours out scarred emotion, open his veins, and bleeds.

More About Mobile Fidelity UltraDisc One-Step and Why It Is Superior:
Instead of utilizing the industry-standard three-step lacquer process, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab's new UltraDisc One-Step (UD1S) uses only one step, bypassing two processes of generational loss. While three-step processing is designed for optimum yield and efficiency, UD1S is created for the ultimate in sound quality. Just as Mobile Fidelity pioneered the UHQR (Ultra High-Quality Record) with JVC in the 1980s, UD1S again represents another state-of-the-art advance in the record-manufacturing process. MFSL engineers begin with the original master tapes and meticulously cut a set of lacquers. These lacquers are used to create a very fragile, pristine UD1S stamper called a "convert." Delicate "converts" are then formed into the actual record stampers, producing a final product that literally and figuratively brings you closer to the music. By skipping the additional steps of pulling another positive and an additional negative, as done in the three-step process used in standard pressings, UD1S produces a final LP with the lowest noise floor possible today. The removal of the additional two steps of generational loss in the plating process reveals tremendous amounts of extra musical detail and dynamics, which are otherwise lost due to the standard copying process. The exclusive nature of these very limited pressings guarantees that every UD1S pressing serves as an immaculate replica of the lacquer sourced directly from the original master tape. Every conceivable aspect of vinyl production is optimized to produce the most perfect record album available today.

MoFi SuperVinyl: The World's Quietest Surfaces and Cleanest Grooves:
Developed by NEOTECH and RTI, MoFi SuperVinyl is the most exacting-to-specification vinyl compound ever created. 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 world’s quietest surfaces. This high-definition formula also allows for the creation of cleaner grooves that are indistinguishable from the original lacquer. MoFi SuperVinyl provides the closest approximation of what the label’s engineers hear in the mastering lab.

"...MoFi brings these tender rocky, lyrical tunes to life with a 45rpm 180-gram 2-LP box set using its One-step Process, which skips the conventional "father" and "mother" sequence and brings the disc significantly closer to the cutting lacquer and original master tape. "Shelter from the Storm" is a prime example of how One-Step recovers detail and layers, emboldens presence range, and further extends the upper and lower octaves. From the guitar / acoustic bass intro to the forward and full-bodied Dylan vocal, the absence of veiling is clear. Importantly, the detail and resolution that emerges is from lack of distortion, not dialed-in EQ. A revelation when compared with the midrange-centered, reedy, and edgier character of the original Columbia vinyl, the One-Step BOTT is a flat-out must have." - Neil Gader, The Absolute Sound, October 2019

These double 45rpm single-step AAA boxed set pressings are as good as vinyl records get. If they don't sound good on your system, it's your system. -Michael Fremer, Analog Planet's Best Reissues of the Decade, March 2020 Features:
• Hand-Numbered, Limited Edition - Only 9000 Copies
• MoFi SuperVinyl Pressing
• UltraDisc One-Step
• 45rpm Speed Edition
• 2LP Box Set
• Special foil-stamped jackets
• Housed in an opulent box
• Faithful to original graphics
• Production and Mastering by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab

Selections:
1. Tangled Up In Blue
2. Simple Twist Of Fate
3. You're A Big Girl Now
4. Idiot Wind
5. You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
6. Meet Me In The Morning
7. Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts
8. If You See Her, Say Hello
9. Shelter From The Storm
10. Buckets Of Rain