Thursday, January 6, 2011

G - 1980-04-18 - Manchester


Here
Posted by at
Labels:

1 comment:

Dr. Forrester said...

Title: PRRPGS015- Duke's Apollo
Date: 18-Apr-1980
Venue: Apollo Theatre, Manchester, UK

1.1 Deep In The Motherlode
1.2 Dancing With The Moonlit Knight
1.3 Carpet Crawlers
1.4 Squonk
1.5 One For The Vine
1.6 The Story of Albert
1.7 Behind The Lines
1.8 Duchess
1.9 Guide Vocal
1.10 Turn It On Again
1.11 Duke's Travels
1.12 Duke's EndS

2.1 The Story of Sid
2.2 Say It's Alright Joe
2.3 The Story of a Hero and a Villian
2.4 The Lady Lies
2.5 The Story of the Smoke Machines
2.6 Ripples
2.7 Introducing Guests
2.8 In The Cage
2.9 The Colony of Slippermen
2.10 Afterglow
2.11 Follow You, Follow Me
2.12 Dance On A Volcano
2.13 Drum Duet
2.14 Los Endos
2.15 I Know What I Like
2.16 The Knife

This remaster project began with the master tapes of the show. This source has previously been uncirculated, a new find for the Genesis community. The show is complete here, except for tape flip gaps. Because the taper wanted to capture the whole Duke Suite on a separate tape from the rest of the show, additional points of swapping tapes occurred, which, in turn, resulted in additional gaps. These needed to be patched. There is a widely circulated, poor quality, alternative source of this show which was used to patch these gaps. There is a significant difference in the quality of these two sources so the patches are rather obvious when they are encountered. We felt it was better to patch the gaps with material from this actual show, to maintain the historic consistency, rather than use higher quality material from a different show. Once the gaps were patched, the show was put together in the original order and sequence. The tapes were digitized in 32-bit, 44.1 kHz format for the work.

Speed was an issue with this recording. A close analysis showed a fairly consistent speed error throughout the show that was easily corrected. The acoustics of the venue also worked against us. The hall characteristics and the location of the taper produced a tonality imbalance that needed correction after the speed error was fixed.
Hiss, hum and other tape noises were readily identified and reduced as much as possible. The auto-record-level feature introduced unintended suppressions in the recording that needed to be restored and repaired. The microphones also had an uneven response and became more sensitive to midrange frequencies during loud sections of the music. Dynamic filters were necessary to fix this problem and even out the tonality throughout the show.
At some points during the show, the tonality shifts and becomes less detailed and more muffled. Corresponding directly with the taper about this, he remembers the security guards being out in force. This caused him to occasionally hide the microphones to avoid detection and this produced the tonality change. The stereo field also shifts quite noticeably at these points. These sections were adjusted as much as possible to correct the imbalance.
In some sections there was distortion of the recording. Many techniques were used and tried to correct the problem but eventually, decisions were made to optimize the sound at the expense of quality. Fortunately, they are not too obvious. The show was then balanced and tracked and converted to CD Audio, 16-bit format to produce the final result.

PRRP Staff

January 6, 2011 at 9:32 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)