Saturday, April 5, 2003

More Torrential Dead I really enjoy live music, but I hate poor sound quality. It is one of the reasons why I gravitate to small club shows (I'm still mourning the loss of the Wetlands in NYC) and avoid anything larger than a ballroom. What is truly sad is that there are some awesome large scale concerts for which the actual performance was impeccable, but the sound quality in the venue was so bad it was impossible to enjoy the music. The Grateful Dead are well known for investing heavily in the quality of sound in any given venue. It isn't about how loud you can make it, it is about filling the space with high quality noise.... When downloading various random live shows from etree, the sound boards or DAUD [digital audience] recordings have always proven to be the ones that I enjoy the most. With that said, I just found a soundboard recording of the 1991 Halloween Dead show. Excellent. And, of course, it is available via BitTorrent (link directly to torrent file). I'll be contributing bandwidth to this one all day. If Funk/R&B/Steel Guitar (Robert plays with the best of them....) is more your speed, there is an excellent recording of Robert Randolph & The Family Band available via BitTorrent. It is an excellent audience recording (i.e. someone set up with microphones in the audience and recorded the show-- something the band supports, but you end up with a much more "live" sound than a soundboard). 2:08:22 PM  pontificate