Just got an email this morning saying my monthly $3 donation went through, and this article reminded me how the internet archive is truly the internet’s library and very worthwhile to support
lol! yes, typo. I don't blame her, but man Freud might disagree.
Reading that comment again (which I can't edit now), I would like to make it clear I was just responding to the OP's note that the bad was super tight in that set.
The team needs to talk to Charlie miller et al, the ones who have been cleaning up and posting the grateful dead archive for the last few decades. They are audio magicians.
Cassettes are a pain. Head alignment is extremely important for analog tape fidelity, and it's always off for home recordings.
With pro analog tape recordings (e.g. 2-inch 24 track, half-inch 2-track), you record alignment tones onto the tapes to capture the state of the recording device, and then later calibrate the playback device to the particular tape so that playback alignment matches recording alignment. But this is essentially never done with cassettes, so you have to earball it.
Cassette players for mastering studios actually have alignment options (e.g. adjustable azimuth) that aren't present on consumer devices. But without the tones, you have to guess.
The problem with starting from a digitized source is that it may have been digitized from non-aligned playback. Ideally you want to go back to the analog originals - but old cassettes are rarely in perfect condition.
Interestingly, the Nakamichi Dragon is/was a cassette deck that can do automatic azimuth adjustment on playback -- without having recorded tones to work with.
In loose terms: It does this with a special read head that splits one of the recorded tracks into 2 distinct signals (for a total of 3 signals from 1 stereo recording). The split tracks' signals are compared, and it adjusts the azimuth (by minutely rotating the head) until the signals from the split track match most-perfectly.
(Take note of the pictures of the machine. If anyone finds one sitting around at a flea market or in a forgotten pile of old junk, please rescue it. Nothing like this will ever be manufactured again. Even if the condition is "it looks like someone went after it with a big hammer as part of their anger management process," the bits that remain still have significant value and are easy to sell.)
I'm glad you called out the Dragon. Besides being an impressive piece of engineering, it's a beautiful piece of art. One of the most striking pieces of consumer electronics I've ever seen.
Grateful Dead has analog reel-to-reel recordings going back to the 60's but most of those have been digitized already or are in the Deads vault.
There are also large collections of recordings on Betamax cassettes made with Sony PCM-F1 digital front-ends which were used before DAT become available. These are digitized versions of old analog recordings and original digital recordings from the 80's. They need transferring and sample rate conversion (they are 44.056kHz) and in some cases pre-emphasis removal.
There is also a lot of digital material on DAT cassettes including analog transfers and digital recordings from the 90s. There are also some CD-Rs where original sources can't be found.
A lot of the cleanup is just figuring out what comes from what show and substituting sources where there are gaps to make complete versions for listening. The archival nature of the endeavor usually limits the amount of "clean up" that is done.
Shout out to everyone in this thread who seem unable to understand a club might have three unrelated acts on, so each performance is called a "concert" under this collection. Aadam and the crew are focused on making each performance a separate entity instead of grouping them up. Substitute "performance" for "concert" if it helps.
He began to attend and record 15 concerts each month, and has said "It went pretty quickly from just being an occasional thing to something I did far too often."
So his average is every other day. Also, most concerts / shows have more than one act. I went to an MF DOOM show back in the day at a small club with FIVE opening acts, and then DOOM had THREE more openers in his set time. That's 9 total acts on one night. Even the sprawling wu-tang tour last year had run the jewels as an opener.
Some fantastic albums here. Clearly dedicated to his craft of recording. There are still a few quality bootleg bloggers out there that give me hope the web can still be special and enjoyable.
As rule, reading the comments on an article is a terrible idea. But quichelorraine123 had a good one.
“...I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody.
Every great song by the Beach Boys.
All the underground hits.
All the Modern Lovers tracks.
I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87.
I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s cut and another box set from the '70s…”
…excerpt of lyrics from LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge”
> “Especially after the first couple years, he’s got it so dialed in that some of these recordings, on, like, crappy little cassette tapes from the early 90s, sound incredible,” deMause said.
I think in some ways we’ve come full circle such that it doesn’t matter.. because people are listening to various compressed streaming music sources, with loudness-wars mixing, output to airpods, phone speakers, laptop speakers, and all sorts of suboptimal listening devices.
The stuff that never got officially released is always the most interesting. Live recordings capture something the studio versions were never trying to.
Just lost an hour going through this. Found a Nirvana show from 1989 at Dreamerz. The recording quality is surprisingly decent for a cassette tape. This is exactly the kind of thing the internet was supposed to be for.
76 comments
The Nirvana gig mentioned is https://archive.org/details/ajc00795_nirvana-1989-07-08 The quality is surprisingly good for a bootleg and the band are super-tight!
Donate to the IA here: https://archive.org/donate
Reading that comment again (which I can't edit now), I would like to make it clear I was just responding to the OP's note that the bad was super tight in that set.
With pro analog tape recordings (e.g. 2-inch 24 track, half-inch 2-track), you record alignment tones onto the tapes to capture the state of the recording device, and then later calibrate the playback device to the particular tape so that playback alignment matches recording alignment. But this is essentially never done with cassettes, so you have to earball it.
Cassette players for mastering studios actually have alignment options (e.g. adjustable azimuth) that aren't present on consumer devices. But without the tones, you have to guess.
The problem with starting from a digitized source is that it may have been digitized from non-aligned playback. Ideally you want to go back to the analog originals - but old cassettes are rarely in perfect condition.
In loose terms: It does this with a special read head that splits one of the recorded tracks into 2 distinct signals (for a total of 3 signals from 1 stereo recording). The split tracks' signals are compared, and it adjusts the azimuth (by minutely rotating the head) until the signals from the split track match most-perfectly.
A better overview is found in this sales flyer: https://www.richardhess.com/manuals/Nakamichi/dragon_folder....
(Take note of the pictures of the machine. If anyone finds one sitting around at a flea market or in a forgotten pile of old junk, please rescue it. Nothing like this will ever be manufactured again. Even if the condition is "it looks like someone went after it with a big hammer as part of their anger management process," the bits that remain still have significant value and are easy to sell.)
Grateful Dead has analog reel-to-reel recordings going back to the 60's but most of those have been digitized already or are in the Deads vault.
There are also large collections of recordings on Betamax cassettes made with Sony PCM-F1 digital front-ends which were used before DAT become available. These are digitized versions of old analog recordings and original digital recordings from the 80's. They need transferring and sample rate conversion (they are 44.056kHz) and in some cases pre-emphasis removal.
There is also a lot of digital material on DAT cassettes including analog transfers and digital recordings from the 90s. There are also some CD-Rs where original sources can't be found.
A lot of the cleanup is just figuring out what comes from what show and substituting sources where there are gaps to make complete versions for listening. The archival nature of the endeavor usually limits the amount of "clean up" that is done.
Carry on.
59-year-old Aadam [sic] Jacobs made his first recording 42 years ago in 1984 when he was 17.
He would have had to average 238 recordings/concerts per year — nearly 5/week — over those 42 years to accumulate 10,000 of them.
He began to attend and record 15 concerts each month, and has said "It went pretty quickly from just being an occasional thing to something I did far too often."
So his average is every other day. Also, most concerts / shows have more than one act. I went to an MF DOOM show back in the day at a small club with FIVE opening acts, and then DOOM had THREE more openers in his set time. That's 9 total acts on one night. Even the sprawling wu-tang tour last year had run the jewels as an opener.
An arrogant anesthesiologist is boring cliche by the way. It’s this likely site has many, many people considerably smarter than you.
Turn down the arrogance no one gives a shit what you used to be able to do.
Remember to donate and help keep the Internet Archive alive.
* Midnight Oil: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
This one has a fairly decent quality recording of "Beds are Burning" too. Australian Classic Rock. :)
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* Tracy Chapman: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
Audio quality is decent here too. Listening to "Fast Car" now, and the quality is solid. :)
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* Ben Folds Five: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* R.E.M: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Björk: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Born to Run: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Captain of Industry: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Depeche Mode: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Lemonheads: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: https://archive.org/details/aadamjacobs?and[]=creator%3A%22n...
* Nirvana: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Sonic Youth: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Suzanne Vega: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* The Bangles: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* The Cure: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
“...I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody.
Every great song by the Beach Boys.
All the underground hits.
All the Modern Lovers tracks.
I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87.
I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s cut and another box set from the '70s…”
…excerpt of lyrics from LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge”
> “Especially after the first couple years, he’s got it so dialed in that some of these recordings, on, like, crappy little cassette tapes from the early 90s, sound incredible,” deMause said.
I think in some ways we’ve come full circle such that it doesn’t matter.. because people are listening to various compressed streaming music sources, with loudness-wars mixing, output to airpods, phone speakers, laptop speakers, and all sorts of suboptimal listening devices.