lotsa new posts lately: 'review' of jake o'clays (EXCELLENT) book, spyglass (neil house "rock"), nocturna (pre-flotation walls), frog a mungus tape, kevyn & the kasualties' first lp, doubting thomas (kasualties-era), greenlawn abbey x2, gut piston (first demo 1992), dan gold's ARP lp…

http://minimumtillagefarming.blogspot.com/

updates: we go 'way out' with an embarrassment post, plus more fucking gut piston & a link to th awesome 'crying your knife away' remaster. in th queue: phony phone calls, kristina, the yips, human boys, blah blah blahrgh…

Good embos post.

I did the restoration work on the master tapes for the sex drive reissue that came out on last laugh. I'm currently doing the restoration on the master for the S/T ep.

The masters for these records sound fantastic. Tons of bass.

So, that got me thinking about the bad sound quality on the heyday stuff, the "crispest, leanest, wackiest remixing/remastering ever to grace th hallowed halls of my late and so sorely not-missed old portable cd player" You're totally right, that stuff sounds like garbage. The difference between the half track masters and the heyday cd is just too drastic for a bad mastering job to make sense. I've got to think that no mastering engineer in his right mind would mess up a track that bad.

So, my current hypothesis on the bad master on heyday is that it wasn't a bad master at all, instead, the master tape to digital transfer was done incorrectly. All of the embos masters that were done at Fort Apache, even the live in studio stuff, was mixed through a Dolby A noise reduction unit. Those Dolby A units were about $2000 per stereo unit in their day, so they aren't all that easy to come by now. It took me a couple of weeks to track one down to do the Sex Drive job. I suspect that when the transfers from the master tapes were done for heyday, they weren't decoded using a Dolby A unit, instead they were just put on a 1/4" tape deck and run into whatever digital unit the transfer guy had.

To experiment, I threw the S/T E.P. masters on my MCI 1/4" deck, set it up to the tones on the tape and didn't decode the playback w/ Dolby A. Bam!, all thin and crispy. Dolby A in, a beautiful mix that kinda sounds like a Thin Lizzy record.

I know it's kinda off topic, but that's my limited insight into why heyday sounds so bad.

thanks, adam! a better theory i could not even HOPE to find. even mr. j. rosencutter, embos live sound guy and sometime asst. recordist, had no such insights. i'm gonna put at least most of yr post on mtf; hope that's cool.

updates: superstar rookie/early empire, 16 bitch pile-up, bygones ('circles'), tom foolery & the mistakes…and i'll get to that other stuff i talked about asap.

updates: frostiva, tree of snakes, shepard & cicirella, human boys.

i'll have you know that obtaining this stuff set me back like $8.90 + tax; an expensive month, expenses-wise, here at mtf. what can i say, i'm dedicated.

i may have given up on kristina. that tape really sux. yips & phony phone calls on th way tho, + more 45s (actio familoe, yeast?, moody jackson, them wranch…).