Pink Floyd 1971-09-18 Montreux, Radio Suisse Romande (24bit/96kHz)
Pink Floyd
Festival de Musique Classique, Pavillon De Montreux, Montreux, Switzerland
Radio Suisse Romande open air mics recording
18 September 1971
Lineage: 1st gen reels (details below) > Nak Dragon > 2nd gen cassettes (Maxell XLII-90) > *Technics RS-B965-M > Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 > Audacity 2.0.3 > FLAC (24bit/96kHz)
xACT used to create FFP
*The Technics RS-B965-M is a modified deck - for details see the Tapeheads.net forum
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
Current total running time: 1 hour 53 minutes 44 seconds
This is a new mono source for the familiar recorder 2 for this date that is often mistakenly described as being from the soundboard. The recording has a wonderful open and dynamic feel and in pristine condition would no doubt be better than the BBC concert from the same year.
The original recording is stereo and was recorded at 7.5 IPS. It was made with open air mics because the station engineers were more used to recording classical concerts. The reels are still, to the best of my knowledge, in the station's possession. Radio Suisse Romande is known to have had its copy digitised at 24bit 96kHz several years ago but enquiries about this and the purpose of the work being undertaken - e.g. a re-broadcast - have thus far proven fruitless. I know the master has songs 1-4 on reel one, timing in at 60 mins 30 secs, plus an unexplained extra three minutes, and assume tracks 5-6 are on reel two.
Up until recently there were significant doubts about whether Radio Suisse Romande actually broadcast the show. Research into various Swiss newspapers has thus far drawn a blank. In March 2014 goldenband noticed something fascinating on another copy of the recording that isn't on the audience source. He found that if you go to the beginning of Celestial Voices and boost the hell out of the treble, you'll hear a ringing sound, with peaks around 7100Hz and 7800Hz. Goldenband assumed at first that this was reel noise but careful listening revealed that it appears to be Morse code. The pattern seems to be: “.-. / .... / ..” which spells "RHI". Maybe this is the smoking gun that points to a broadcast origin.
My thanks also to goldenband for his speed correction advice. The whole recording runs slow, and unfortunately it slides around a bit. I changed the speed five times in Audacity with values ranging between 3.83 - 5.95%. AHM and ASOS are impossible to get perfectly right with the technology I have to hand but have been improved a great deal with an approximately-correct overall speed.
Individual adjustments were made in the analogue domain to each side to bring the channels into balance. ASOS was significantly quieter than the other songs, for example, so I re-set the levels on the Saffire where necessary. If you wish to compare this source to other copies of Radio Suisse Romande’s recording, the opening to ASOS is a good point to assess.
The songs are in the wrong order on Stratcat58’s tapes: A 04-05, B 06&01 and C 02-03. I refer to “current” running time because for the purposes of this raw version I have not trimmed out the duplicated tuning up at the end of Atom Heart Mother.
The 1st gen is on Ampex 456 Grand Master 10 1/2 reels recorded at 7.5 IPS.
Stratcat58 cassettes / Neonknight tape transfer, March 2014