| Tech Note |
The following is excerpted from Bill Giles notes on the remastering:
First the bad news: First note or two of Bertha (d1t1) is missing there is a momentary irrepairable drop out at 5.05 in Truckin' (d2t4) on the original sources. There's also a miniscule drop out in Dark Star (d3t1) at 14.45 - but hardly noticeable there are a few whirrs and bangs that seem to originate from the bass, noticeable mainly in Casey Jones and OMSN. These originate from the master reel. Virtually all the breaks between songs were cut on the source CD: these have been tidied with fades and pauses. The rest is all good news - you only need read on if interested in the detail. The main work is set out below.
DISC 1 and 2
Cumberland Blues:
extracted from Europe 72, pitch flattened by one-third of a semitone to concert pitch (- 2% speed), and patched between Next Time and B.E. Women.
Brown-Eyed Women: volume reduced by - 2.0 dB to match the rest of the set
General:
Left channel balance increased + 2.5 dB in all songs (except Cumberland) to place drums in stereo centre. (The stereo balance was noticeably right biased.) Various minor pops, crackles, glitches removed or scrubbed in varioussongs (mainly Bertha, T Jed, Playing, Truckin')
DISC 3
In addition to the new source (which has a number of faults), I had 5 versions of Disc 3 to choose from. Although all are ex Sonic Solutions (and thank you David Gans for all of this), amazingly enough each one is different! There are the 'post FM compressed' models, the 'uncompressed missing first notes of Dark Star' models, and the 'lamentable to pretty good Dark Star > Sugar Mag transition reel splice' models, plus permutations. All these models have a number of other common minor defects that I've repaired. I probably haven't caught them all - but you gotta be careful: one man's glitch could be Billy's rimshot!
All versions of Dark Star seem to come from two vault sources. There is a slight but perceptible change in sound at 5.33. I guess this arises from the tape used for the 24 minute extract on the 'Glastonbury LP' that started around this point.
This remaster is based on the 'non-compressed, includes the first notes of Dark Star' model which I believe to be closest to the Sonic Solutions master, though the splice left room for slight improvement. Main corrections are:
Dark Star: various digi-crackles and glitches removed 31.30 - 31.40 The splice is now millisecond perfect (and validated against the AUD tape!), and I've adjusted the volume profile after the splice (what splice?!!)
Caution: a few minor glitches removed between 1.30 & 3.10 |
