My interest is piqued. I do not notice thinness, harshness, or some of the other qualities you mentioned when listening to my MoFi. It sounds better IMO than releases like Sunshine Daydream or Cornell ‘77. Of course, being an official live album, the post recording production is quite different than the other releases. And the MoFi has the obvious benefit of being AAA, where all the others are not. But this is a favorite album of mine and I am tempted to grab a copy to shoot out myself
I have the MoFi and an original WB press of Skull****. They both sound very good but the MoFi takes the sound to a higher level.
Well, I'm glad that you perceive yourself as one guy, because if you thought you were 2 guys, we'd hafta start the medication...
And if you listen to it from that pretty pink box, you can hear how much better Live/Dead could have been if The Eleven was from 2/27, too.
This box set (and yes, it is pretty) was my first serious foray into GD, and it still remains by far my favourite! Absolutely LOVELY!
I am not a fan of the box set due to all the effects added by Jeffrey Norman when it was mastered for the Fillmore West CD box set.
This caught my attention- are you saying the 50th also uses a thick hard-stock cover like the MOFI pressing? That would be an nice and unexpected surprise..
Sorting through my Dead collection right now. I'm guessing that the white label Winchester pressing of Anthem is the remix, probably same quality pressing as the Artisan? Green label W7, green label shield, palm trees Burbank, white label WB, white label Arista, dark label Arista... The consensus seems to be that green labels are best up through Live Dead. Artisan or Winchester pressings for later albums? White label Arista vs dark label Arista?
Grateful Dead records were not always a massively profitable cash cow. In fact, some of them weren't profitable at all, when they were first released. In particular, the Dead went indy for a while- with their own record company, Grateful Dead Records/Round Records- and while the first couple of releases sold well, many others did not. The band reckoned without the rise of OPEC and the resulting skyrocketing price of oil (and, hence, virgin vinyl.) They also picked a weird time to retire- one year after they started their record company. And the "retired" band apparently didn't even consider releasing any material from their tape archives as officially released vinyl, despite all of the evidence that there was ample demand, even then. The closest the band came to putting out a live archival release was, um, Steal Your Face, released in 1976. That 2-LP set- a pastiche of bits and pieces taken from the last Winterland run, practically assembled out of scraps- sold like lead hotcakes, and was showing up in cutout bins within two years of its first release. SYF was released at approximately the same time that GD Records president Ron Rakow (aka "Anton Round") dealt with the looming complications of the business by cutting himself a check, taking the money and running. By the end of 1976, the Dead had decided to cut their losses as an in-house operation and signed with Clive Davis's Arista Records. Arista inherited the rights to the GD and Round Records catalog, along with the ability to issue re-pressings. Clive also apparently inherited a lot of unsold stock of records that had already been pressed, and it stands to reason that he or his minions decided to convert it into cash as quickly as possible. Hence, Cats Under The Stars, Diga Rhythm Band, Robert Hunter's Tiger Rose, The Good Old Boys, and the rest of the Round Records catalog were remaindered in cut-out bins by 1980. I was buying punched or cut-out copies of Diga for $0.50 apiece. Cut-corner copies of Steal Your Face were $2.99, then $1.98. I don't recall ever seeing original pressings of Blues For Allah in cut-out bins, but the Arista/GD re-pressings eventually ended up there. The first couple of records put out by the Bob Weir-affiliated band Kingfish were on Round Records. I bought cut-corner copies of those LPs for $0.50, too. For that matter, the Dead's Arista LPs eventually ended up in cut-out bins in the 1980s. All of them, I think, from Terrapin Station through Built To Last. But at that time the habit of record companies was to do massive runs of LPs- in the late 1970s and 1980s, the era immediately prior to the rise of the compact disc. And then when compact discs took over the retail market toward the end of the 1980s, the unsold inventory of vinyl got even more plentiful. So Grateful Dead LPs had plenty of company in the cut-out bins in those years- including records by some of the biggest selling acts of the era: Fleetwood Mac, The Who, Dire Straits, The Pretenders, Tom Petty, XTC...if you didn't mind a cut corner, sealed copies for $2.99.
The vinyl used Plangent processing and the. d boxset did not. They are definitely not the same mastering
Nice thread to find. Just unearthed my 500+ albums while I expect to setup a TT soon. I believe I have all the original dead pressings, though I started in 70' so the first three may not be; will check back. Zafu
It looks like the future days rerelease of Two and Three from the Vault are delayed until October now.
My feedback will likely come slowly, as it's taking me a while to sort, clean and listen to my recovered collection. That's so cool ! I haven't yet, or do I know if I will, find my original Anthem of the Sun copy purchased in 1969-1970, probably lost or broke it; cause what I do have appears to be the 1973 stereo release on just the Warner Bros label WS 1749. After a good cleaning, I find it to be in surprisingly remarkable condition. My opinion may be tainted since I have mostly listened to live shows for many years and don't recall when I actually put this on last, but omg, was blown away by the clarity, particularly of the vocals. Sound-staging is excellent as well. Thing is, I listened to this album a thousand times as a kid, but on the basic gear I could afford at the time, which wasn't much. Now, I'm listening to it on my 1976 Technics SL-23 TT AT-VM95M via Macintosh C-42, Macintosh MC-7200 to refurbished Tiel 3.5 speakers and of course, it's breath-taking compared to the old days. Looking forward to updating as I get to more of my dead vinyl collection. Zafu
My copy, while not perfectly quiet, is not moderately noisy either. Im sure you have, but if not try giving it a clean. My copy is luckily dead quiet for Dark Star, Playing, Bird Song, and China Rider.
