| Pink Floyd - Sheffield 2nd gen (Petef451-Neonknight) (24-96) |
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| Notes |
| Recorded at the City Hall, Sheffield, UK. Great audience recording. From the info file: Pink Floyd 1970-12-22 Sheffield 2nd gen [24-96] Pink Floyd City Hall, Sheffield, England 22 December 1970 Lineage: 2 x TDK AD normal position 2nd gen cassettes > *Technics RS-B965-M > Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 > Audacity 1.3 > FLAC > Reaper v4.61 > FLAC (24bit/96kHz) *The Technics RS-B965-M is a modified deck - for details see the Tapeheads.net forum xACT used to create FFP 01 Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast 02 The Embryo 03 Fat Old Sun 04 Careful With That Axe, Eugene 05 Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun 06 A Saucerful Of Secrets 07 Atom Heart Mother 08 Atom Heart Mother Reprise Total running time: 2 hours 31 mins 6 secs A fine end to the year, these tapes feature the only known live recording of Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast and outstanding performances of a number of songs. Atom Heart Mother features brass and choir conducted by John Aldiss. The right channel was stronger throughout on Pete’s cassettes and after careful comparisons I decided to drop the weaker channel. This reduced the hiss levels significantly, solved phase correction issues (the tapes are shifted ~15 samples) and dealt with some dropouts. My version is much clearer than the raw version used for releases such as ‘Rise & Shine’ but is also more hissy. You would not think I have used the same tapes. Close to three years ago (this has truly been a slow burner) I did some preliminary work on Pete’s tapes with littlepieces. At the time we were tempted to switch the Dolby on on my deck to address the hiss. I found it didn’t work and the high end was pushed a long way down. The recording sounded much more subdued, like the versions that have previously circulated. Perhaps some EQ would work well in expert hands. The tapes were recorded with Dolby B on - the label confirms this. I broke the recording up into segments and transferred each of them at optimum level: 1. APB - Embryo - FOS 2. CWTAE 3. STC 4. ASOS 5. AHM - AHM Reprise My thanks to goldenband for sending me his customarily thorough speed correction advice. AHM was essentially uncorrectable without major intervention as the pitch slides upward by nearly 3% over the course of the song. The rest of the show was largely fine or, where a change was required, relatively easy to fix. APB and ASOS have some issues, but the former was fixable and we concluded that the latter could be safely ignored. Unusually for this show, a lot of the tape runs a bit slow. That was surprising because most copies seem to trend fast. Speed corrections were applied varying between -3.23 to +1.92%. The most complex change was to Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast where three corrections were made utilising the long passages of sound effects. We left CWTAE and STC alone because they're both within 0.5% of the correct speed. ASOS was very strange indeed! First of all, Rick's organ pitch is unstable throughout the song. Goldenband kept hearing slight fluctuations, which suggests a possible power problem, but might be a tape problem. Usually we can rely on Rick for our pitch reference, but here it gets very dicey. The beginning of the song is close, within 0.5%, though probably a hair slow. Then we have non-pitched music until CV, which starts out at the right speed. There's a sudden tape speed drop but it seems to recover over the next 30 seconds, so we concluded no correction is needed. Then we get the power failure followed by the avant-garde piano playing. Someone then seems to be playing a variation on Celestial Voices, but either they're playing it in the wrong key - a semitone too high - or something very strange is going on. Pianos are never tuned sharp, as they can explode. Something doesn't make sense here, but maybe someone - David or Nick? - is just improvising a Celestial Voices variation in C minor, who knows. Another possibility, that the band was tuned very low for the whole show because of organ voltage problems, is too terrifying to contemplate! But David's voice doesn't sound off, so goldenband thinks it's just “a bit of weirdness”. Then the restart, and we seem to be going too slow yet again, but then over the next 10-15 seconds the tape speed creeps back up to normal. There is then another speed drop, followed by a recovery. By the time we reach David's second set of vocals we're probably about 1% fast, but then we go back to normal-ish. Throughout the restarted CV the pitch keeps slipping a bit, but the final cadence is roughly normal. Bottom line, it was best to leave ASOS alone. It's messy, but never goes too far from correct pitch. AHM starts out about -0.58% slow, but rises over the course of the song until it reaches about +1.75% fast; AHM Reprise is steady at +1.75% but the contrast with AHM would be jarring so we also left these songs alone. This raw transfer has some voltage/static spikes which could be relatively easily fixed but I decided to leave them in the spirit of keeping this release raw. I hope you enjoy it and a big thanks to Petef451 for lending me his tapes and letting me keep them for so long. Petef451 cassettes / Neonknight tape transfer, March 2015 |