HARSH REALITIES

Date : 01/12/1972
Lieu : Palais des sports de l’Ile de la Jatte, Saint Ouen, France
Label : Keywood / eckoes (Yeeshkul)
Pochette : Ace Bootlegs Production
Support : 2 cd
Durée : 103:46 mn
Source : Audience + Retransmission RTL
Qualité sonore : 7,5/10

Liste des titres :

CD1 – 47:59

1. Heart Beat Intro (2:13)
2. Breathe (2:40)
3. The Travel Sequence (6:23)
4. Time (5:37)
5. Breathe (reprise) (1:03)
6. The Great Gig In The Sky (4:23)
7. Money (6:16)
8. Us & Them (7:09)
9. Dave’s Scat Section (6:42)
10. Brain Damage (3:50)
11. Eclipse (1:43)

CD2 – 55:47

1. One Of These Days (8:16)
2. Careful With That Axe, Eugene (11:12)
3. Blues (4:53)
4. Echoes (22:46)
5. Childhood’s End (8:40)

Commentaire :  Certainement la meilleure version disponible de ce concert. La première partie du concert (d’origine audience) dispose d’une qualité supérieure à celle que l’on trouve sur le bootleg « Blow your mind until you die« . La partie diffusée par RTL est complétée de patchs qui permettent d’avoir « One of these days » et « Echoes » en entier. Voir les détails de cette édition dans le commentaire ci-dessous :

• Broadcast: RTL was an AM radio station. In Mono. The concert was professionally mixed, but the sound was compressed and low-pass filtered. Other AM recording from RTL from the early 70’s, even on their website have a HF rolloff starting at 4.5 kHz and finishing at 6kHz. This ain’t no ideal broadcast condition for a concert, especially for the Floyd. Problem is that this concert has never been broadcasted again, so that’s all we had. This means that the concert sounds pretty rough to the ears, it is quite difficult to make out the instruments apart. But there was also a strange strong buzzing noise near 6kHz that was broadcast along the concert (we never found what this « buzz » was).

-Recording: Many recordings exists from this concert, every single one of them are incomplete. The most complete (and luckily the best sounding) source available is a 1st gen copy of a analog tape recording, transferred to DAT, and then recorded on a computer at 16-bit and 48kHz. Yeah, that’s right, there’s no direct recording of the broadcast available, and no complete tapes exists too. Sad but true. This specific source is phase shifted, suffers from a lot of dropouts and tape cuts (due to this source being a copy of a recording), and is plagued with hiss and background hum. And that’s not all: the tape ran a little too fast.

Restoration:

-Basics: the RTL tape was speed-corrected. Then, the show was converted back to mono by making both channels = right channel. This step also removed the phase-shifting problem altogether.

-Edits: we went went through the tapes and fixed as many of the drop outs that we could find by attenuating or trimmimg them by hand. Sometimes, entire sections were duplicated (due to a tape-flip during the copy), so we ended up with a much shorter recording. We also replaced the first note of Us And Them that was cut off by the tape flip with a little piece from later in the song in order to have a solid start. What we end up with is something that sounds a lot more like the typical recordings of the period than it did before.

-Patch: « Heart Beat Intro », « Breathe », the first half of « The Travel Sequence », the first half of « One of These Days », and the beginning of « Echoes » were missing. That makes nearly 10 minutes missing. The source for the patch is a 3rd gen analog tape from the previous show in Poitiers, France (November 29, 1972). It’s a mono audience recording, but a really good one IMO. The source is from the « All your life will ever be » (Speed Corrected Series 004) roio. This may be controversial for some but we « downgraded » the show from the night before to make his SQ totally match that of the RTL tape, in terms of compression and EQ. The reason for it is to attempt to make the edit seamless between the two tapes. We think we managed to get it right, it’s not perfect by all means, but you could swear that it is definitly the same show, only that the drum mics has been turned on by the engineers.

-Filter: absolutly nothing whatsoever was broadcasted below 5600Hz. So we used a low-pass filter on 5600Hz with a high slope to remove the hiss without removing any musical content at all, not even the slightest harmonics: just terrible HISS.

-EQ: as stated earlier, the recording was very harsh to begin with. The main goal here was to bring as much clarity as we could: there were no high-frequency to begin with. There was also a deafening buzzing noise just over 5600Hz, exactly over the broadcast limit. So, many EQ-passes had to be performed, very carefully, in order to make it less brutal than it was. Another problem is that both sets sounded totally different, both in tonal range and in noise. I believe the first set is a higher generation tape, and possibly from a different source altogether (a different person taped the broadcast, perhaps, with different gear and/or tape stock). This set suffered from a very boomy bass sound with a lot of low overtones, especially a kick drum that punched through the rest of the band and made it very difficult to equalize the other instruments properly. We had to compromise on the low end because of this, so it will seem like there isn’t enough a lot of the time, yet be abundant in other spots. We even did cuts of the bass frequencies that overpowered the rest a note at a time when necessary. The main goal was to achieve a pleasant sounding recording, and we think we managed to do it with what we had.

Disponible ici :  https://1fichier.com/?i9ma5lmdtb

Autres versions de ce concert disponibles dans ma collection :

• BLOW YOUR MIND UNTIL YOU DIE
• REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

 

Pochette:

Bootleg n°2340