"Crimson, White and Indigo" -July 7,1989 - Grateful Dead In Concert

This DVD took me by surprise, got to listen to it last night without any distractions, It seems like 89 was the year of Concert Videos and possibly the hottest year of the Dead, Being a Seventies Dead Fan, I have listened and watched all of the Others like "Down Hill From Here" and "Truckin' Up to Buffalo", the companion to this one, recorded three days earlier, Which was good, but nothing to jump up and down about. As soon as I put on my headphones and put in the DVD, I was captivated by the quality of sound, the excellent camera work, You spend the show on the stage with The Grateful Dead, You see some very neat and candid things that you normally would not see. I was totally transported by the DVD to like being there, it is just incredible, best camera work I have ever seen on a concert film. I had my Oppodigital DVD player set on 5.1 instead of stereo for the Phones and I must say , the sound was out of this world. As usual, it would take the Dead a few songs to get everything tweaked just right. The first set was a bit unusual, putting "Iko Iko" as their second song. "Little Red Rooster was third song". They were destined to rock out that night. Their vocals were stellar that night. Brent Mydland turning i some great performance, especially on "Blow Away", where he started this like talk part of the song that put the huge crowd in his hands, The rest of the band kinda backed off and let Brent shine. It was quite an emotional moment where Brent had the crowd in his hands. It was the set ender and after Brent was done, you could see Jerry smile at Brent with a big proud papa type smile, they always had a good musical relationship, feeding off of each other.

The DVD goes right into the second set, in the fully packed JFK Stadium, which held close to 100,000 and it looked packed. "Box Of Rain" started out the next set and Phil plain nailed it and there was some great vocal harmony at the end, Weir, Garcia and Lesh. A great version of "Scarlett Begonias" was next, by this time the band was firing on all cylinders. The drummers were hot, Bobby was doing his Bobby thing , backing away from the mike and then sort of attacking it again. Phil's bass is playing in his very all over the place, but right where he was supposed to be mode. There were smiles all around, it just was so cool, being up so close to the action, you could hear lots of little comments, it showed a shot of the Drummers from the back once where they were watching Jerry and talking to each other. In the seventies , The Dead used to take a long time between songs, Their show in the late 80s was tight, I did not notice words being forgotten, and as usual, Jerry was phenomenal in his playing, you would hear a lull, and then Jerry would rip out a solo that was so tight and hot, and Brent was so hot in his responses to Jerry's playing.

There was a very good selection of material from all over there career, From "Turn On Your Lovelight" to newer material like "Standing On The Moon". This is a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, but this is the Dead at the peak of their game. A Great show for older Dead Heads and newbies too, wished I had seen one of the rare screenings, There was one very close to my house, the week before the package was released. Rhino got this one right, wish that the DVD could have been sold separately, because I am not going to be listening to the CDs, I'm going to listen to The DVD thru my Oppodigital universal Disc player, great sound. A plug for it too.

www.Dead.net

Americans like TV better than stereo, why we have hi-def video, but not audio

Recently, I purchased an OPPO Digital universal disc player or DVD player, I wanted to upgrade my CD player, but that is a lot of bucks. This unit ,the 1080, geared towards sound is 169 dollars, makes your regular CDs sound alot better and if you have DVD audio product or SACD CD, they sound incredible. Yes, there is technology to make much better sounding music for not much more money, Company's are not making much in the way of SACD or DVD audio these days, because we did not want it, I remember Best Buys used to have a whole aisle of it. If you do want to listen to something awesome, check out Alison Krauss's "Live DVD" , It is quite remarkable sounding in dolby digital, which the OPPO does too. I guess most people are wired for visual rather than audio. Today's CDs for the most part , don't sound that great, there is not a standard sound. When we had vinyl, it seemed like all records had about the same sound quality, well, unfortunately, not true for CDs. Another enhancement, the OPPO picks up is the HDCD, which is done alot, but if your CD player can not read the HDCD, you can't hear what it does. Alot of true audiophiles have gone back to vinyl completely, a lot of today's CDs are available on vinyl. Rhino records and MusicDirect are two good websites to look for vinyl. A common myth about CDs is that mastering is some kind of digital magic that started with CDS, mastering has been around since vinyl records are mastered too, but in analog. In truth, you cannot hear a digital signal. It has to be converted to analog so you can hear it, so one of the most important things about a CD player is its Digital to Analog converter. My old CD player, which is only about 10 years old had a 1 bit DAC(converter), that is not alot, my OPPO has a 24 bit DAC, which is a big reason that it sounds so much better.
Finally, one last modern thing we have are mp3 players, mp3s are very compressed forms of music, so they do not take up much much space and the average mp3 player that people jog around with has a DAC that costs about 15 cents. Well, enough of that, I'm sure that lots of you knew at least some of this, but I sure wish that there were more SACDs around, in fact, they make a hybrid kind now, that you can play in any CD player, so maybe they will catch on.
Best now
Jim