Hithub GrooveDisc — Reggae & Dub Classics CD

The Hithub GrooveDisc Reggae and Dub Classics CD assembles twenty tracks of Jamaican reggae and dub recordings from the 1970s and 1980s, sourced from original two-inch 24-track master tapes held in the archives of Kingston recording studios, remastered with particular attention to the sub-bass frequencies between 40 Hz and 80 Hz that define the genre’s characteristic sound and place unusual demands on the CD mastering chain due to their high acoustic amplitude and the long-duration sustained nature of reggae bass lines. The remastering approach applied a bass management strategy of mono summing all frequency content below 80 Hz to eliminate phase cancellation between left and right bass recording channels that commonly causes bass energy loss in wide stereo mixes, followed by bass frequency contouring with a parametric equalizer at 60 Hz with a 1.5-octave bandwidth and plus 3 dB gain to emphasize the fundamental of the bass guitar in the most impactful range for small to medium loudspeaker systems. The dub mixes on the second half of the disc apply the original studio echo, reverb, and filter drop-out effects as captured on the original session tapes, without modernization or enhancement, preserving the lo-fi mechanical artifacts of the spring reverb units and tape echo machines used in Kingston studios as authentic elements of the dub aesthetic. Packaged in a standard jewel case with a 24-page booklet.