Revisiting Blackjack David

[JoeG]

I have not sat down with this tape since shortly after receiving it. It arrived shortly after my deck and pre. Now that we have a lot more time on the deck and the right cable synergy, all can say is: Wow! This is a really fine tape. it has a delta blues/California folk feel to it, despite the fact that the lyrics are kind of dark and sad. Excellent soundstage and instrument spread, and like TP009, the vocals are locked dead center. Now that we're 9 tapes into Series 1, perhaps more of you are like me: you haven't been listening to this one as much as in the early days when we only had a couple of tapes. do yourself a favor and mount these reels on your deck, turn the lights down low, and enjoy...

[oneobgyn]

I totally agree however for me this has always been in my top 3 of the first nine. I loved it from the first play and I do agree about dimming the lights and turning up the volume

[ironbut]

In the early daze when I was playing the demo tape (before there were any public releases) "Blackjack David" and "Abilene" were the two most requested cuts by a long shot. Needless to say, I got a little burnt on it. I did take your advice and listened to it the other day and what a pleasure. Great music, amazing sonics,.. what more could you ask for!
Thanks for reminding me.

[Ben]

I agree about dimming the lights. I have to go a tad farther ... kill the circuit breaker
for the fridge and the freezer since I live in a one room apartment.

[ironbut]

I just finished getting an ornery electrostatic headphone amp working (after endless hours of troubleshooting) and decided to roll a few TP tapes to take it's measure. I'd been rolling tubes in and out and found a decent sounding set which are partly burned in now.
As my previous post indicated, I was a little burned out on this particular selection but my plan was to work my way through all the tapes. One of the things that I was never super happy with was the way that the song " Abilene" got a little congested on my other headphone and speaker system. This time, there was zero congestion and I could hear the instruments as they should be, separate and singing in their individual tonalities. I can tell you that I was just in heaven! Afterwards, I had to wonder just how deep a sonic well these tapes are. I'd assumed that the congestion was an artifact on the master tape (we're talking very, very subtle here) and just something that I'd have to live with. Ahh, the joys of rediscovery!
So if there's something on one of these tapes that you're not happy with (that isn't an obvious glitch that's part of the master), it could very well be the tape telling you that you need to do some serious tweaking. And if that doesn't help, maybe technology will catch up with the potential of these tapes someday.