01 - Greatest Story Ever Told > | 1994-03-21 | Grateful Dead

2:44:05

SBD

Rating:

7.00 / 5 ratings

Transferrer:

Matrix by Roger Eichorn

SHNID:

gd1994-03-21.125739.mtx.eichorn.sbeok.t-flac16

Source:

Matrix of Source 1: SBD > DAT > CDR > SHNv3 and Source 2: AUD Source (handheld/ORTF/110^/DFC/FOB/18th Row) B&K 4011s > Neumann BS48i-2 > TCD-D3 > DAT(m)

Lineage:

DAT(m) > Sony DTC-59ES > SPDIF > Tascam HD-P2 > Audacity (16/48 > 16/44) > CDWave > FLAC; matrix by Roger Eichorn

Taper Notes:

View NotesGeneral Notes:

- Thanks go to everyone who worked on and made available the sources used in this matrix.  Obviously, this project would have been impossible without their prior efforts.

- Both sets are seamless.

- Stella Blue, Stella Blue, STELLA BLUE!!!

(The first set is pretty good, too.  "Bertha, Bertha -- OH MY GOD!"  Hilarious.  We learn the rest of the story after the song: apparently he'd been on tour for some time and had never heard a Bertha.  Good for him!)

Technical Notes:

- The sources were remastered and mixed in Logic Pro 9.  A bunch of clean-up was done, at various stages, using iZotope RX 3 Advanced.  The sets were split in WaveLab LE 7.  SBE's were fixed using Trader's Little Helper.  Conversions to and from .flac and .wav were done using dbPowerAmp.

- The SBD source is missing a small portion of "Drums" as well as the encore.

- The SBD source is weird.  The first set is nearly perfect (esp. in terms of speed), but the second set has numerous problems.  First of all, it's slow -- indeed, it's progressively slow as the set goes on.  It starts out around 1% slow and ends up about 2% slow.  This might not sound like a lot, but it is.

I mention this especially because the undisputed highlight of the show is the Stella Blue.  But the Stella Blue appears late in the second set, which means that the SBD source is nearly 2% slow during that track.  In other words, any of you out there who have, like me, listened to this version of Stella many, many times, we've always been hearing it slow.  Now, unless we have perfect pitch, we've never listened to it and thought, "Boy, that sure is slow!"  But it sounds *even better* heard at the proper speed, whether or not you have perfect pitch.

For this reason alone, I think this matrix is a serious upgrade over the SBD copy.

- Another problem with the SBD: the second set is noisy.  There's harsh hiss and crackling throughout.  It's especially noticeable during any quiet parts.  I tried to tame it where I could, but it seems that these problems came out of the SBD that night (since you can hear them in the AUD copy).  So they're not artifacts of a faulty transfer, and they're pretty much impossible to get rid of entirely (if you're me, at least).

- For the first set, I slowed the AUD source down by 0.01% using the iZotope Radius algorithm.  For the second set, I split it into small sections and speed- and pitch-corrected them all individually.  Further fine-tune syncing was done in Logic Pro 9.

Roger Eichorn
[email protected]
September 23, 2013