Harsh Realities [1972 RTL AM broadcast restored by }{eywood / eckoes 2011]
Date: December 1st, 1972
Venue: Centre Sportif de l'Ile des Vannes, Saint-Ouen, France
Original Source: AM radio brodcast
Channel(s): Mono (1.0)
OU Notes: In 1972, RTL was one of the most popular radio station in Europe. Despite having their studio in France (they were the intended audience), they had an insanely powerful transmitter in Luxembourg to overcome the French legislation that banned private broadcasting at the time. Because of this, they could be heard all over Western Europe, even in Scotland during beautiful days. At the time, Pink Floyd were very popular in France. They knew it and toured extensively there. It's nonetheless quite surprising that the band agreed to broadcast live one of their shows from there because they only dealt with the BBC for this before and after this show. Well, if you consider that RTL was sponsoring 9 of their concerts in french-speaking Europe at the time, it's not that surprising, maybe it's part of the deal. The show we're talking here is the second from those 9 dates (the original poster for this mini-tour is included in this package). It's their last live broadcast on any media 'til the 1989 Venice TV show (one of their shows was recorded in November 1974, but was edited prior to broadcasting many months later).
Concert: That night was special in many ways:
-"Blues" jam, generally played as an encore in a few show, is part of the concert.
-"Childhood's End" make it's live debut in that show. It was played sometimes that month and at a few show in March 1973 before disappearing completly from their setlist. In fact, it's the very first time a song from the album "Obscured By Cloud" (released 6 months before) was played live.
-They played an entire proto "Dark Side Of The Moon" live on the airwaves, almost 4 months before it's release. One can hear that "The Mortality Sequence" is on it's way to become "The Great Gig In The Sky", "The Travel Sequence" jam is still there, and that some arrangements are not quite finished.
01 Heart Beat Intro
02 Breathe
03 Travel Sequence
04 Time
05 Breathe (reprise)
06 Mortality Sequence
07 Money
08 Us & Them
09 Dave's Scat Section
10 Brain Damage
11 Eclipse
12 One Of These Days
13 Careful With That Axe, Eugene
14 Blues
15 Echoes
16 Childhood's End
Recording:
-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.
We offer an alternate remaster of the concert to all those who don't mind a little tinkering with the shows. Here is what }{eywood did to the tape to make the "tweaked" version:
"Thanks to Creamcheese I discover an interesting secret to bring missing high end back to dull recordings. The software I used was mainly designed to fill in the bad artifacts of low bitrate mp3s, but it works pretty well at bringing back high end on dull recordings too. Now, with this tape it worked to a degree. The problem with this recording is that the software works by (somehow) creating complex harmonics of the existing frequencies, but in this recording there are no high frequencies above 5khz to shift up. So what I did was to make a copy of the file, EQ it so that all that existed was the 3-5khz range and run it through the program, which gave me a high end that went up to 8khz and sloped off to 10khz. Now this wasn't all very useable, because it was all ringy sounding due to being harmonics, but it was better than what we started with. I pasted this over the original file and then EQd it to sound as good as possible. What we have now is a high end that goes up to about 10khz. Sadly, there is now more noise in the added high end. And because it is synthesized high end it has a very ringy quality to it (if you've ever heard what a ring modulator does you'll understand the characteristics of what I mean). I had to attenuate this differently, yet try to make it sound as similar to the superior quality second set as was possible. So you will notice a lot more noise in set 1, noise with a strange quality to it. It sounds a bit like a really worn LP groove at times, but I think its better than no highs at all. After all this was done I ran the whole thing through a very good stereo simulator program to widen the field."
Conclusion:
Until a complete tape of the show surface, this is by far the closest you can have to the original broadcast. We hope that RTL recorded the show in high-quality and that this tape will leak one day. Until then, this is the best we could do from what we got. It's not perfect, it's still a bit rough, but it's much better than before in our opinions.
rar files packed with a (winrar) recovery record -
links require copy and paste to browser
rapidshare.com:http://lix.in/-9b4656orhttp://lix.in/-952bdc
http://lix.in/-96b27d
http://lix.in/-98391e
http://lix.in/-99bfbf
http://lix.in/-9b4660
http://lix.in/-9ccd01orhttp://mkrzrw.link-protector.com
http://mkrzrv.link-protector.com
http://mkrzrk.link-protector.com
http://mkrzrm.link-protector.com
http://mkrzrz.link-protector.com
http://mkrzrn.link-protector.commegaupload:http://lix.in/-9097e5orhttp://lix.in/-99bfab
http://lix.in/-9b464c
http://lix.in/-9ccced
http://lix.in/-9e538e
http://lix.in/-9097ef
http://lix.in/-921e90orhttp://mkrzcm.link-protector.com
http://mkrzcz.link-protector.com
http://mkrzcn.link-protector.com
http://mkrzcc.link-protector.com
http://mkrzcr.link-protector.com
http://mkrzcs.link-protector.comComments welcome.
