Today is a good day at Thrasher's Wheat.
Our boxsets 'Return to Greendale' and ‘Way Down in the Rust Bucket’ by Neil Young w/ Crazy Horse both arrived safely and intact.
Both boxsets were ordered from The Greedy Hand official store last month, along with Young Shakespeare.
#00839 - ‘Way Down in the Rust Bucket’
Neil Young Archives Performance Series Disc 11.5
#0919 - 'Return to Greendale'
Neil Young Archives Performance Series Disc 11.5
It's been a bit rough of late for everyone, so we decided "what the heck" and treated ourselves to the full boxset packages. Just in time for some weekend enjoyment.
peace
Bucket Envy @ TW HQ
Hooray! Lots of spinning to do. My record store had NYA Vol. II ready for me this morning. Listened to Disc 1 on my way to get first vaccine shot today, and most of Disc 3 on the way home. About to play the Tuscaloosa CD on the Old Homestereo
ReplyDeleteIncredible, listening to Archives on spotify
ReplyDeleteUnreal
Letter from nam, so cool, original version of long walk home
wow, speechless
Okanagan Doug
Too bad Spotify is low resolution. You are only hearing 1/100th of the music.
Deletemust be nice
ReplyDelete:(
ReplyDeleteMassive video dump this week! Well, they’re really visualizations...
What’s new: over 50 videos on NYA2 song cards.
How to listen: REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. Since the videos cannot be played in either album playlist form or continuously through the cabinet, it is just as easy to play them from latest to earliest recorded. Start with CSNY Human Highway 4/15/76 and work backward through the Stills-Young stuff, a handful of Odeon tracks, and some choice ‘75 Horse, ending with Like A Hurricane.
Keep going, one backwards album at a time. You’ll hear Dume in reverse, introduced by solo piano No One Seems To Know and Crazy Horse’s Pocahontas. Little Wing kicks off a long sequence of Homegrown/Old Homestead tunes. The result of this scheme is an abridged version of NYA2 that winds its way back over the span of four years, with frequently trippy video accompaniment.
Any drawbacks? The missing videos are mostly missed. It amounts to a small percentage of the overall haul, but these are the tunes sans vids: odeon budokan - all 10 tracks; dume - pardon my heart; walk on - walk on; roxy - roll out the barrel; tuscaloosa - here we are in the years, after the gold rush, out on the weekend, heart of gold, time fades away, lookout joe, new mama, alabama.
Having to select them one at a time is a bummer, but this is the best way, using the arrows to go back through the file cards. You can go fullscreen or keep the video embedded in a large viewer, where the song’s date recorded is conveniently still visible. File cards with no video are easily clicked past. There is a minor snag when you hit outtakes and have to click on the cabinet to escape.
Why it works: since vinyl necessarily plays start to finish and CDs and digital can’t have the track order reversed without some programming (and Cabinet View plays chronologically), the videos are a practical way to enjoy the collection from latest to earliest performed. And there are some real visual gems in here. Ideally the NYA2 viewing session would culminate in a screening of Journey Through The Past!
I'm curious what you think of the much narrower stereo mix of the Rust Bucket DVD. On top of the narrower (almost mono) mix, it has more low end and less dynamic range. Some would go as far as saying it's an interior mix to the CD, hi-res and LP and hard to comprehend why they changed this from the preview videos from last year.
ReplyDeleteAny thoughts, Thrasher?
When the full movie premiered on the Archives site, I noticed it was of lower fidelity and stereo range and assumed it was an issue with the streaming file that would be resolved. So I’d be curious as to thrasher’s take on this as well, since I can’t come up with an explanation better than it was an error in mixdown that was missed before pressing. I suppose it could be an intentional narrowing of the stereo field to coincide with the vintage videotape presentation, but no one would want that feature in the product. If we wanted to dumb down the audio, we could do that with factory presets on our home receivers. Unfortunately when seeing this major flaw in combination with the obvious error of one of the camera video tracks being out of sync, my verdict is that the film is simply of a far poorer quality than the CDs, and these easily remedied mistakes were overlooked before it was sent to the duplicator. For someone with video editing software at home, both of these issues can be fixed and a new master file created. Otherwise, what we are left with is a phenomenal LP and CD set in a beautiful package with a lo-fi video bonus feature included.
DeleteOr in case for those that bought the DVD separately, 20 dollars not so well spent. If it's a deliberate choice it's a strange one, if it's not, it's some poor QA/QC. I've already sent a letter to the editor, hopefully he'll reply.
DeleteCongratulations guys Enjoy the wonderful journey.
ReplyDeletePeace 🙏
I also think the CD and stream from the Archives website sound much better than the DVD audio...I also noticed the video being slightly out of sync with the actual music but only on a few songs
ReplyDeleteI don’t know...with the ‘under construction’ banners I tend to think we should just be thankful that we’re even debating this in 2021
Oh and Billie seems the most baked during this show...I mean he is toasted tee hee hee
@ tomatron - thanks for update on the new videos for songs on NYA. we'll get something up on that eventually.
ReplyDeleteAlso, good question on DVD audio. Not sure what's going on here other than these comments. Have not had a chance to do a grand audio quality assessment under optimal conditions. life yo know, which is ok.
@ Harm - we were going to suggest a LTE to tomatron, but glad you asked. we'll look for a reply.
@ Jonathan - any luck?!