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OK, Beatle Peetle, this is it! The Decca Tapes...at the honest-to-(insert
your favorite deity here) right speed, at last, no foolin'.
Despite what they all said about their Decca Tapes being speed-corrected,
they were all wrong. These tracks have always been at the wrong pitch
on every single issue- Deccagone, Circuit,
Yellow Dog (twice), Vigotone,
Masterdisc... but this issue is guaranteed
to have these recordings running at A=440 on every track. Each has been
played against the grand piano preset on a Korg M50 workstation, and adjusted
to match in Adobe Audition 3. Even if the group were not precisely tuned
to concert pitch when they played it, they are now. You can play your
instrument with all the songs without having to retune or being even a
hair sharp or flat.
The source used here is the Masterdisc CD. It sounded the best out of
all the other issues, and had no noise reduction, except that it ran a
semitone sharp, with some variations. There was a small imbalance in level
between channels - that's fixed. Not a fraction of a second of audio is
added or taken away.
Two fixes have been performed. The first note of "Hello Little Girl"
ramped down in speed from a higher pitch. That has been straightened out.
And the folks at Masterdisc had combined the channels of their tape to
mono. This was fine because their playback was in phase to begin with.
But on "Searchin'" there were two spots right next to each other
where the phase was out for a very short time, as it had the telltale
swishing of phase cancellations. Those have been patched with audio from
the Vigotone CD "March 5, 1963 plus The Decca
Tape."
That iteration was horribly out of phase due to azimuth misalignment
during digital transfer; it was at the wrong speed (which was fixed),
and it has a ton of noise reduction applied, which dulled the high end
and rolled off the bass. Even after phase correction, it was still brighter
in the left and duller in the right, evidence of multiple-generation dubbing
on different tape machines. So the two fragments needed for the patches
are taken from the left channel, and re-equalized to match the Masterdisc
sound as closely as possible. It worked out so well that you'll never
hear it when the patches go by (the patches are less than a second in
total).
Barring another issue from even closer to the master, this is about as
good as it gets for the Decca Tapes.
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910 Core - Not to everyone's taste
