More of the Music of Iron Butterfly
The craziest thing we learned in our shootout from many years ago is that something close to half of all the yellow label, authentic, non-record-club Atco copies we played had clearly been mastered from a dub tape on side two, the side with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
We’re guessing that at some point after 1968, when it came time to recut the record, the cutting master for side two was either damaged or couldn’t be found.
Not a problem the label says to itself, we have a safety tape we can copy and use for side two.
Problem solved, except for the fact that on those copies In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida sounds like a cassette playing on a machine with clogged heads. The sound is smeary, veiled, small and recessed — all but unlistenable.
That was a shock, but the other shock we experienced was much more to our liking: hearing that the sound of the best copies is actually surprisingly good.
The tonal balance is right on the money, but of course, because this is a compilation, it is made from copies of master tapes, not real master tapes themselves, so it will always have that blurry, smeary, recessed, flat, opaque, airless, sub-generation-tape sound. In short, it’s dubby.
Further Reading
- How to go about collecting better sounding records
- More dubby sounding records audiophiles should avoid
- More titles we’ve discovered with individual tracks made from dubbed tapes
