Found on deadnet central, originally appeared in The Nantucket Independent:

Howarth resurrects the Dead
BY MARLI GUZZETTA

Restoration is an art form on Nantucket. Houses, boats, shorelines – everything seems to have a shot at resurrection here. And so maybe it makes perfect sense that when Jamie Howarth moved to Nantucket year-round in 2002 he founded Plangent Processes. Using patented technology, the company removes irregularities from old audio recordings — the flutter and the “wow” — to restore the recordings to their original sound quality.

On Jan. 20, Rhino Records will release a fully re-restored performance of the Grateful Dead’s 1976 New Year’s Eve show at the Cow Palace, employing Plangent’s “Clarity” techniques.

“The buzz out there has always been that this was a good show,” Howarth said. “It was kind of a transitional show between old Dead and new Dead, with ‘Bertha’ and ‘Morning Dew’ on one side, and ‘Help is on the Way’ and ‘Slipknot!’ on the other.”

Jeffrey Norman is a mixing engineer who has worked for Grateful Dead Productions for 20 years; included in his body of work are a restoration of the re-release of “The Grateful Dead Movie” on DVD as well as a nine-CD release of the band’s four-day Fillmore concert in 1969. He worked with Howarth on the Cow Palace re-release.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent file Jamie Howarth, founder of Plangent Processes, in his Nantucket studio.
“The Cow Palace show is an excellent example of the mid-70s band,” Norman said. “The Dead went through many transitions and eras that involved slight personnel changes and styles. This show has almost a jazz flavor — it’s a very elegant representation of that era. By the time it gets into the second set, it’s quite a voyage. …and Jamie’s process does add sparkle.”

Commissioned by Grateful Dead Productions and Rhino Records, the Cow Palace show marks the first record business project for Plangent, which has restored “Oklahoma!” “West Side Story,” “South Pacific” and “Young Frankenstein” for Fox Video and Sony/MGM.

A former Hit Factory engineer and post-production supervisor for ABC, Howarth said that Plangent’s first clients were film companies because the film industry is far less conservative with spending right now than is the music industry.

“The record business is conservative right now. There’s fear of downloading, and there’s less money out there, so they’ve been slow to catch on to this,” said Howarth, who was initially frustrated by the fact that high-end audio engineers were interested in the Plangent process, while labels weren’t. “The film industry was fascinated by it, because it had a real physical problem with film breaking down in the can. And when film breaks down, it stretches, and there’s a tremendous amount of speed variation.”

Whether it’s working on old film or old music, Plangent brings the entire old recording to a clear and consistent speed.

“One of the big problems with recording in general is how to keep the machinery on a steady speed. In a live performance, the instruments are perfectly steady. In the case of tape, you’re asking a piece of plastic to negotiate its way through a miniature golf course of metal, wires and so on. When the tape is moved through the recorder, if it runs fast or slow, you’ll get warbles, wow and flutter,” Howarth explained. “We were interested in building something that would solve this problem. … One of recording’s useless artifacts turns out to be useful as a clock. With digital signal processing, we can use that clock to retime the digitized audio and remove microscopic speed variations that resulted from the mechanics of the tape machine.”

Using the Internet as a meeting place, Howarth recruited the services of professionals from all over the world — mathematicians at Cambridge, UK, film professionals in Los Angeles and engineers in New York City — to perfect his technology.

Original material is best for retiming old audio, and Howarth had first-generation 16-track recordings of the Cow Palace show for the restoration — previews of which are available on YouTube. (Google “12-31-76 Cow Palace,” and the YouTube results will show.)

“Jerry Garcia was in great shape emotionally, and theatrically. There are a couple of beautiful vocal performances, and the Clarity process lends quite a bit of help to that,” said Howarth, who added that a listener can now hear many details of the music that were inaudible due to interference.

Howarth said his process of audio restoration reenergizes the “gestalt” of the original recording.

“The finished product sounds like a live broadcast. … The emotional punch is there; you don’t feel like you’re listening to a recording,” Howarth said. “That’s the whole purpose of hi-fiaudio —to break down the barriers between the performer and the listener and minimize the intrusion of the artifice.”

Plangent’s next job is to restore Elvis Presley’s “Wild in the Country” for 20th Century Fox.