Bootlegs In The Olden Days

[Mark W]

I was looking at software available to clean up recordings, remove hisses, background noises and the like and it got me thinking about how readily available advanced recording is these days.

In the 80's and early 90's we used to give away anniversary tapes at our local soul night.

We got the regular DJs to tape 6 or 7 tracks each then took those tapes to a recording studio who compiled them on to a 60 minute tape and made a hundred copies for us.

The resulting sound quality was reasonable, but variable, quality and crap compared to what can be done now.

So, if thats what could be done in a studio with tapes in the 80s/90s it makes me wonder how a lot of the boots were made which had pretty good sound quality.

Were these boots lifted direct from the original vinyl? I assume nobody dug up the master tape of, for example, "Philly dog around the world" or "I don't like to lose."

I've had the boot of PDATW and remember it to have pretty good sound. Same goes for that 4 track 7" white label which had Cecil Washington, Elusions and 2 others on it.

Anything clever happening with these boots or just lifted from a good quality original vinyl?

[Guest]

A lot of the 70s boots were made with the original stampers and in the same pressing plant as the originals.

[Godzilla]

I guess the quality of the cassette tapes is an issue too.

Mrs G has some reel to reel tapes that her dad made by hooking up his record player to the recorder in the late 50s/early 60s, when they lived in Singapore. Even after all these years, the quality is better than some of compact cassettes new releases I used to buy in the 70s/80s.