| Pink Floyd - Montreux, Switzerland, Recorder 1 (restored master) (Neonknight) |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Notes |
| Recorded at the Festival de Musique Classique, Pavillon De Montreux, Montreux, Switzerland. Excellent audience recording. From the info file: Pink Floyd 1971-09-18 Montreux, Switzerland, Recorder 1 restored master (16bit/44.1kHz) Pink Floyd Festival de Musique Classique, Pavillon De Montreux, Montreux, Switzerland 18 September 1971 Lineage: 2 x Sennheiser MD-421 > Uher 4200 reel recorded at 7.5 ips > Audio CDs > EAC > FLAC > Reaper v4.61 and iZotope RX3 > FLAC (16bit/44.1kHz) xACT used to create FFP 01 Echoes 02 Careful With That Axe, Eugene 03 Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun 04 Cymbaline 05 Atom Heart Mother 06 A Saucerful Of Secrets Total running time: 1 hour 48 minutes 54 seconds This is without doubt one of the best Pink Floyd audience recordings from 1971. Back in 2009 Travis S arranged a fresh transfer of Victor's master reel. Victor charged for his time and various people clubbed together to organise the payment. Prior to this, TS was in protracted discussions with Victor, which I assisted him with. TS sent me a copy of Victor's transfer as thanks for my help. Some of the files don't match the version that has previously been torrented and I used my copy for this restoration. There is a fundamental problem with distortion on Victor's transfer because the levels he set were recklessly hot. Perhaps this is because he felt obliged to just do a single pass after baking the tapes. Using iZotope's digital clipping repair tool, I made it my objective to recreate the transfer he could have achieved. The work revealed a number of big mic bumps which can clearly be seen in the wave form. Somebody else might wish to remove them and boost the overall gain but I left them intact to make this record as raw as possible. Some of the mic bumps still slightly clip but I concluded that doesn't matter. I also used iZotope's azimuth functions, which calculated the right channel to be 15ms faster than the left. Speed correction advice was kindly provided by goldenband and I applied separate values to each song ranging between +0.7% and +1.45%. None of the values were wholly satisfactory as each song slides around, especially Echoes which accelerates significantly over time. The only track that may be relatively stable is AHM, ironically enough, but the out-of-tune horns make it difficult to be sure. The very beginning of ASOS threw goldenband off at first but he concluded that Roger's bass is out of tune (sharp) with Rick's keyboards, as so often happens. Some interesting information from Victor was included in the text file that accompanied the raw release. Here is a copy and paste. Concerning his rig at the time, Victor had the following to say about it... 'I had my UHER 'custom unbuilt' in multiple parts, so I could sneek it in more discretely. Then I built a whole 'neck-holder' (like the ones Bob Dylan'd use to hold the harp), a heavy construction sewed in a tough-tissued jacked (often way to hot to bear at concerts...) and the two mics were placed niftily beside each ear hidden by the dutiful long hear...' He said he has never released these shows directly from the master tapes, but did say, specifically concerning the 11/21/70 show, that the compilations I spoke about, we made them on cassettes only, so if it's the compilations circulating, it very much looks like that probably somebody copied them from these cassettes = 2nd or even 3rd generation. He did mention that he used to have a number of parties and that, quite likely, what we have in our collections comes from someone copying this compilation tape, which would mean that most lineage we have could possibly be bogus. Him and a buddy of his would usually record the same show and then combine their smaller, 13cm reels into a large reel by splicing their masters together. He describes their method as follows... 'Since we had both a Revox at home that can take the big reels as opposed to the UHER which can only take 13 cm spools and one big reel can hold up to 3 (or 4) small spools, we always recorded on the UHER Side 1 of spool A, and then Side 1 of Spool B and then Side 1 of Spool C and then Side 1 of spool D and then continued the recordings (either he or me) continuously on Side 2 of Spool D and then Side 2 of Spool C and then Side 2 of Spool B and then Side 2 of Spool A. When all spools were full, we scotched them together on one big reel... We never wasted expensive tape to copy onto. Especially since we're really buddies (from childhood), if either one of us wanted to listen to the tape, he'd have it, no problem. So why bother copy (except excerpts on cassette)?' The transfers required Victor to do some repairs to his reel deck and bake the tapes, which he said took him about three days. Neonknight, October 2015 |