Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Safe As Milk [Music On Vinyl 180g DoLP] "DM series" vinyl rip in 24/96 & CD-format

I hope that "Safe as milk" is a programmatic posting :-) Thanks for continuing.

Much appreciated!

Gruss & Dank & Cheers aus dem Eierland!

nice sound! thanks! But still slowed down, I'm afraid. Just like the wish you were here rip... It sounds thicker, but I'm afraid it's misrepresented...

This is nonsense. The speed is definitive correct... Setted up with stroboscope & test tone. Both results were perfect.

Hi aksman!

Thanks for fine music.

What's happened with HiResMusic?

Somewhere there will be a new HiResMusic?

Many Thanks.

@aksman Perhaps put your tools aside and listen.. compare it to a CD rip, or PBTHAL's rip of this one. Pitch is lower on your rip. I've been playing the guitar for a long time, I know my tuning. You will also notice that all your tracks are a couple of second longer. You can see this in your recent WYWH rip. And just so for the sake of my own sanity I did some time measurements and this is what I got. I measured it using soundforge.

- From the first cymbal hit on "Shine on you crazy diamond" until the moment the effect is heard when the machine shuts down on "welcome to the machine" the time on:

1) 2011 WYWH CD remaster is: 20:25.178
2)[CBS-Sony Japan 1st Pressing 35DP 4, 1982] 20:24.992
3) on your recent WYWH rip it's 20:39.226.

Now, there is very little difference between the 2011 remaster and the Japanese issue. Maybe my measurement is not perfect and granted I can't hear the pitch difference between the two. BUT I can hear that the pitch is lower on yours. And by the way, where do 14 extra seconds come from, I wonder? any ideas? I didn't check "Safe as milk", but I bet there's time difference there as well, as I can hear it.

@ floydian_wgwm

The whole side A on CD is 21:08, my rip is 21:15 minus 3 seconds for fade in and out is 21:12... This means there is a difference of 4 seconds.

I actually measured parts within the tracks to avoid different fade ins and fade outs, and there is no pause between "shine on" and "wttm." AFAIC, 14 seconds give or take a second or two still stands. But let's say I outrageously erred (I know I didn't, though) and the difference is 4 seconds as you say, I'm glad that my ears are more reliable than your stroboscope :-)

This and 'Strictly Personal' are my favourite Beefheart albums, thanks for the new rip.

Bravo!! and many many thanks for your rips!

@aksman, @floydian_wgwm,

okay - I compared aksman's wish you were here with PBTHAL's using audacity and importing each rip's track 5 as a single track in an audacity project. I figured that for comparing, best would be to identify a place where a decent dynamic "explosion" would allow for exactely positioning both tracks. so I identified 9.30.558 in aksman's and matched it to ~9.27:375 in PBT's, giving an as close as possible match. Listening from that point gave the impression of one piece of music. But: when going i.e. to 2:02 there is a gap of about a quarter of a second between the peaks of a drum beat - clearly visible and listenable - with the version of aksman having the later punch. Additionally, if going to about 11:24:50, tendency is that things start again drifting away.

BUT: no definitive difference in pitch, which leads to tow possible conclusions.

a) the master is not only differently mastered (different tonal impression and dynamics) but also mixed - somewhere PBTHAL's version lacks a few parts of a second
b) there must be broken musical source, a glitch no one so far identified during listening.

Even more, if the difference had to be explained related to the speed of the turntable, aksman's pitches should have been higher, not lower, as floydian_wgwm hints...

I tend to a)...

Oohh - could of course be an error in audacity, but I tried this trick of shifting and comparing with same versions (but cut at the beginning) of aksman's wish you were here and they were definitively identical :-)

I completely disagree with that observation... if the turntable is slowed down then the pitch must be lower.
Aksman's rip lags as the time progresses. Try playing "Have a cigar" for example from wywh rips simultaneously. Play aksman's rip 1 second before the other, you will notice that by the time the guitar solo begins, they will match and then at that point you will get the 'detune' effect (people who use electric guitar effects will know what I mean). Then the other rip overtakes the new rip and you get the delay effect.

Moreover, the whole slow down thing has nothing to do with this specific record, Cap. Beefheart, but also with WYWH and the new Zappa Hot rats rip; I listened to it today. BTW, I actually still have aksman's old rip of the same Zappa Hot Rats 200gr pressing, absolutely my favourite, it blew my mind the first I heard it. Anyway this is the info that came with it:

"Technical Informations

Music Hall MMF 5.1 Turntable
Goldring 1042GX reference Cartridge
Belari VP-129 Tube Phono PreAmp with Sylvania 12AX7WA
Tascam US-144 external USB 2.0 Audiointerface
Interconnections by "Goldkabel"
Wavelab 5 recording software
TT > Belari > Laptop > Wavelab 5.01 (24/96) > manual click removal
analyze (no clipping, no DC Bias offset) > split into individual Tracks > FLAC encoded (Vers. 1.21)

No silence been removed, please burn gapless to match original tracklayout."


I am not 100% sure this is aksman's rip but it sure looks like his info file, people can correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyhow, the latest Zappa rip has the same problem. I compared the old track: "Son of Mr Green Genes" with the new one. Same thing, slowed down, with lower pitch. Accordingly, the old track time: 8:57, new track time: 9:10. It's the same pressing and there's additional 13 seconds on this one track. Even if there are fade ins/outs there is still a couple of more seconds left. Old track length is near identical with PBTHAL's rip of this record. I can't tell what the case is with the other tracks as I already deleted them; I decided to hang on to the old rip, my favorite :-).

I hope none of you guys will take any offence with me being this argumentative about this. That is not my intention here. I have a ton of aksman's rips and I love them and am very thankful for them. I just hope that you would consider these discrepancies, and hopefully make the best possible rips.

This will be my last comment to this topic...

You may be right, there are differences in track lenght on the newest "Hot Rats" rips. The strange is, that most tracks are longer and some are shorter. Normally this isn't possible unless you have trouble with the drive.
The Music Hall 5.1 and the 9.1 were a wonderful TT and great values but haven't any opportunity to make any speed adjust. For that reason I never checked the speed of both previous turntables.
The Bergmann have this opportunity for 33 & 45 rpm. There are only 2 ways how to control and do the adjustment...
The first and most easy is the use of a stroboscope disc. those disc shows very nice if your TT runs to fast to slow or correct. A 2nd way is to use the use of a test tone (e.g. 1kHz )played from a testrecord and to record... A frequency analysing should show the identical frequency if the speed is adjusted correctly.
I did both with the Bergmann TT and the results were perfect.

You have to understand that you can't do anything else on TT's...


Now we should relax and come back to the main thing, enjoing the music and the improved quality.

Thank you for that !

(Just a question - not a big deal - but I think the artwork comes from another edition, isn't it ?)

I just discovered this conversation about pitch differences because I just did some of my own side-by-side, track-for-track comparisons of Aksman's new "Safe As Milk" rip vs. PBTHAL's 2010 rip of the same - and found a *huge* difference in the pitches of these two rips. I didn't know this was already being discussed here but I'm not surprised that it is.

"Safe As Milk" runs at just over 1/2 hour in length and there is a full 75 seconds of difference between Aksman's and PBTHAL's rips. I don't have a CD version of it handy so I can't tell which one is correct and which one is way off the mark. PBTHAL's runs much faster that Aksman's. Both cannot be correct.

I can't see any ripper of their caliber being so far off in pitch by accident so I can only assume that the two LPs are mastered at completely different pitches. ???