New Miller 71 Grateful Dead SBD's

First I've heard about this. Care to elaborate?

I haven't pulled down CM's new 71 stuff yet. How big an upgrade are they? I have downloaded a ton of his remasters, and they are almost all great. I just snagged his new 10-24-72 remaster - nice.

These are pretty exciting in the Dead trading world.

For those who don't know, Charlie Miller has provided the Dead's fabled 4/26-4/29/71 run as new files directly from the 2-track master reels. A couple things to note:

1. Charlie's notes indicate that the reels were baked and transferred by David Gans. This is important not only because Gans knows what he's doing, but also because he is in a position to know that these really are the masters. It's not uncommon for a new fileset to be trumpeted as a master reel set but to sport an obvious generation or two. Not so here.

2. All three are available in either 16/44.1 or 24/96 filesets. This is huge, as they are some of the first real landmark shows to truly warrant the 24/96 treatment. I always download the bigger files when they're available, but it's not often that the difference between 16/44.1 and 24/96 is that obvious when we're talking about first row balcony master audience reels from 1980 or something. With these filesets, and especially with 4/29, there's ample reason to choose the 24/96.

3. The patches are great. They are apparently taken from Rob Eaton's 16/44.1 DATs straight from the 16-track masters. These shows have always been plagued by questionable patches or obvious tape flips in cringe-worthy places. All better now.

4. The pitch correction seems to be spot on. IMO, Charlie struggled somewhat at pitch correction when he first made it part of his SOP, but these sound perfect.

Anyway, that's what I've gleaned based on a couple quick listens. To be perfectly frank, 1971 isn't my favorite year for the Dead, as the shows lack both the exploratory qualities that make 1969 my year of choice and the jazzier elements that make 73/74 so damned much fun. But these are most definitely worthy of your valued can time. :-)

This is definitely true. The DP series often suffered from over-aggressive EQing, almost as if the engineer was trying to leave his own mark on the recording. In his best work, Charlie Miller's hallmark is transparency.

Thx for the heads-up. I hit my saturation point with the Dead show collecting some years ago, but sounds like I should make an exception for these.

Yeah, that was the issue for me - I gave up on the whole GD Show upgrade cycle a couple years back. I have about 800 live GD shows that I downloaded in lossless (SHN or FLAC) and even put on CD's (as many were downloaded well before HD space became so cheap). This is about 10 times more than I really need to begin with, and some shows just seemed to get "upgraded" constantly, which got tiring.

That said, those are some pretty great shows, and Charlie definitely has been working tirelessly on doing these upgrades, which is highly admirable to be sure.

I like 71 GD a lot, but I do prefer 72-74 for sure. I personally like the band's sound from that era better - but of course YMMV.

Sounds nice. But I haven't followed GD download sites, so don't know where to look for this. Anybody care to illuminate a newbie?

As long as you know how to use bittorrent: bt.etree.org | Community Tracker - Details for torrent "gd71-04-28.sbd.miller.106100.flac24"

Thanks, Skylab. I had almost figured that out with Google, but hadn't figured out where the torrent download link was on the bt.etree.org pages. Duh. I'm sticking with the 16-bit versions, since I only have a 16-bit DAC, and Apple Lossless is only 16 bits. Also, 1.5 gigs takes long enough over my 160K DSL line. 4.5 gigs is half a day.

I was getting it to download for a little while, but after getting my DSL connection DDoS'd twice (at least I think that's what was happening; it went comotose), I had to stop. Maybe I'll be able to manage it sometime in the very early morning.

iTunes can do 24 bit. I think ALAC can too. FWIW.

Right you are. AppleLossless.com says: "Apple lossless supports 16 bit and 24 bit audio, as well as multi channel audio, such as 5.1."

Good to know. Most of my source music is from 16/44.1 CDs, but as I collect, I'll keep that in mind, for a hopefully-near-future where I get a better DAC. Unfortunately, I doubt a faster internet connection is in my near future. Not available where I live.