Genesis: Sheffield 1980 (Remastered FM) FLAC

City Hall, Sheffield, 17th April 1980
FM-broadcast recording (HallamFM Sheffield).
Restoration/Mastering/Cover design by tom 2006
A TM Production. GEN800417TM

CD1 (65:07):
01. Deep In The Motherlode 5:56
02. Dancing With The Moonlit Knight (Opening Section) 1:53
03. The Carpet Crawlers 5:44
04. Squonk 6:48
05. One For The Vine 11:30
06. Behind The Lines 5:21
07. Duchess 6:56
08. Guide Vocal 1:46
09. Turn It On Again 4:38
10. Duke’s Travels 7:14
11. Duke’s End 2:18

CD2 (70:41):
01. Introduction 1:04
02. Say It's Alright Joe 7:53
03. The Lady Lies 6:11
04. Ripples 10:16
05. In The Cage 7:27
06. The Colony Of Slippermen (Instrumental Excerpt) 1:12
07. Afterglow 4:25
08. Follow You Follow Me 4:28
09. Dance On A Volcano 4:46
10. Drum Duet 0.53
11. Los Endos 6:09
12. I Know What I Like 9:16
(Times show the actual music without intros*)

THE STORY:
On 07.02.06 at 18:08:46, Andy Hill aka "broadway" wrote on the official forum: "I came across two old tapes of the Genesis Sheffield City Hall 17th April '80 and just had a quick listen. The sound quality is excellent and the tapes are in good condition. I was wondering if anyone had the time or inclination to attempt transferring and remastering (if necessary). This source is low gen (1st or second). I realise there are several great versions of this already but you can't have enough Genesis boots eh? Thanks Andy"
So he sent the tapes to Speedy - he made a quick transfer by himself and sent the tapes together with a DVD containing his transfer files and another raw source (the famous Tony Ryan tapes that were used for SAB12) that he thought could be useful to fill the gaps on Andy's tapes.
I was lucky to get the original tapes - I always prefer to do the transfer by myself just because of two reasons: it will be done by professional equipment and it's possible to align the azimuth of the cassette player's head to the tape. So thanks again Andy for providing me with your masters!
The tapes turned out to be awesome - very clean, almost without FM statics and well balanced. Only few minor dropouts and clicks could be noticed. The sad thing was that the songs were faded in and out at the beginning and the end of each tape side, sometimes by overlapping for some seconds but some bits were missing. So it was pretty clear that the tapes were 1st gen at least and it was obvious that I would need the other source to fill the gaps.
Andy's tapes were encoded with Dolby B and the STUDER A721 could decode it properly, so I gained some dBs in signal-to-noise ratio in this way. There was still a huge amount of hissing left - so I decided to do a slight broadband de-hissing by Cedar Cambridge's Dehiss-3 module first, which meant that I would have to do another de-noise processing - after the EQ stage. This operation is usually more successful on high hissing levels than a single de-noising stage because it produces less artifacts.
Next step was speed correction - all Sheffield recordings suffer from being too slow - sadly the A721 has no varispeed so I had to do this in the digital world. - Then came EQing. Very important! I'm always trying to use official released tracks as sound references which usually helps a lot, so I used Deep In The Motherlode from Drury Lane 1980 (Archive 2 box) which worked fine (great sound, Nick! ;)). - For the final de-noising I went back to Cedar, now the NR4 module did it's best. SIAJ was the most critical challenge of this remaster, as music and hissing floor almost had the same level. There are some other similar parts but this one was the worst. So I worked on these particular parts for hours, always trying out different settings and making recalls in-between to make sure I'm dealing with a compromise I can live with (last minute I decided to use the Tony Ryan source for the low level parts of SIAJ, it turned out that it produced less artifacts than the new source).
Next step was to build up a four track session to mix the different sources. This was not the easiest part because they were not only different soundwise but in the stereo image spreading too. And it's complicated anyway to set longer cross-fades between different sources of the same performance because it always causes audible phasing effects. For the last stage I added slight bits of overtones from the Retro Exciter to get back some brilliance in the upper frequency range and I set the overall volume level.
I did some recalls in-between and so I decided to improve the sound balance especially for the quieter sections of the show. It was obvious that the noise reduction had muffled the sound a bit, so it was necessary to add some brilliance here. As a side effect the noise floor rised again, but that was not bad at all.
After the mixdown I had to listen two or three times to the whole show under headphones to notice and eliminate all clicks, dropouts and minor flaws of the
recording. This was the most time-consuming part. AV and Speedy helped a lot here by spotting even the tinyest flaws.

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