.
******************************************************************************************************
Manchester 1969-06-22 (16bit/44kHz)
**Lord Snooty 1st Gen Cassettes**
Pink Floyd
June 22nd 1969
Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England
Lineage: Philips Portable Cassette Recorder + Mic > One C60 tape + Demonstration Tape > Maxell UDXL II Cassette > Nakamichi 700> Cakewalk UA-1G > Audacity 1.3 > Wav (24bit/96kHz) ----> Samplitude10 (32bit float/96kHz) > Wav (16bit/44kHz) > CDWave (1.98) > FLAC
***Lord Snooty's Notes***
I first made contact with John when I was given his address in the late 80's. Originally he had given out a copy of his tape with a running time of about 38 minutes, he reasoned that no one would be interested in the recording due to the numerous flaws and breaks. He was persuaded to make a copy of all he had captured that night.
I sent out a few DAT copies from this tape during the mid to late 90's, and this is probably the source of most circulating versions. I understand that a claimed 'from the master tape' source is around, but I would suggest that this is pure bunkum. John has since lost the master.
***Neonknight's Notes***
A friend of mine corresponded with the taper John Baxter about 10 years ago. He was pleased to learn that copies of his tapes were still doing the rounds as he lost his masters.
John went to the concert with a companion and they were sat in row B or C in front of Richard Wright. The recording was made on a Philips portable recorder and they used the microphone that came with the machine. To record on John had one previously used C60 tape and the demonstration cassette that had come with the recorder, with the record protect holes taped over so it could be used. They were quite nervous, being only 16 at the time, and John noted that they didn't really understand the medium they were using. The body of the mic had a remote control switch which they regularly utilised in an attempt to achieve maximum highlights, hence all the numerous cuts.
With the regularly distorted sound and various disruptions to the flow of the music, it's unlikely that this concert will ever be at the top of people's playlists but its fortunate that it exists so we can better understand this fascinating period in the band's career.
You might like to particularly listen out for evidence of the Azimuth Co-ordinator, which panned sound around the Free Trade Hall in quadrophonic sound. It featured 2 pan pots and 4 channels and debuted at the Royal Festival Hall on 14 April 1969. The Co-Ordinator is currently on display at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (April 2010).
***Littlepieces' Mastering Notes***
This is a mono recording that was processed as two channel stereo. The left channels output is much higher and though the difference varies, it is generally 4-5db higher than the right except where noted. The recording has a phase shift that varies mostly from 0.06ms to 0.20ms and much more during the second half of 'Doing It' and 'BtToL' and "TEotB'. Given the content of the channels are the same, except where noted, I eliminated the right channel and replaced it with the stronger left channel for most of the recording. This resolved both the phasing and channel output issues for most of the recording.
The last 2:10m of 'Doing It' from about 8:12m - 10:22m has very different characteristics than the rest of the recording. The SQ of this segment is considerably less than the rest of the recording. On this segment only, the output difference switches channels with the right becoming the dominent channel by at least 5db though still 4db less than the 1st part of 'doing it'. The phase shift becomes 0.80ms-0.90ms which is more than 2x greater than any other part of the recording. Also, the left channel includes content bleeding through that is not part of the show. In addition, at the beginning and end of this portion of 'doing it', there are short bursts of radio content that are not part of this show. Both of these bursts were removed. At times this segment of 'doing it' sounds like its duplicating some of the first 1:23m before the SQ change, but I couldn't definitively verify this so all content was retained. Though the left channel on this 2:10m portion of 'Doing It' was more than 5db less than the right, it had better dynamics and HF content than the right so it was retained, its gain increased 6db, and the channels manually aligned to improve the phasing.
Except for 'Doing It', the tracks 'Behold the Temple of Light' and 'The End of the Beginning' have lessor SQ than the rest of the recording. Also, except for 'doing it', the phase shift at 0.40ms was 2x greater than the rest of the recording. The right channel had better HF content than the stronger left channel and therefore it was retained, its gain increased 4.8db, and the channels manually aligned to improve the phasing. The left channels gain was also increased 1.5db since these last two tracks of "The Man' were lower overall than the rest of the suite.
The lesser SQ and the additional HF content in the weaker channel of 'Doing It', 'Behold the Temple of Light', and 'The End of the Beginning' was likely due to the phase shift being greater than the rest of the recording.
Those familiar with this recording know the taper stopped his recorder often, creating cuts and restarts within some tracks. Also, there are many micro dropouts probably caused by slight depressions of the stop or pause button. The objective was to repair/smooth these sections without removing any real content from the document. Whenever possible, harsh artifacts created by the tape recorder being stopped or started were eliminated or reduced and dead air was removed. Many of the micro dropouts were improved by eliminating the small bit of non-content and splicing. There were 9 segments that I was able to use content from the right channel to replace dropouts in the left channel. These varied in length from 0.023s to 1.750s. On three of these short segments the gain was increased to improve the transparency of the drop out.
There were about 20 noises removed. The objective was to retain the various mic disturbances with the few exceptions being very prominent and ill-timed occasions. These few were reduced significantly so as not to disrupt the show as much.
During STC there is an artifact that is also in the DAT versions. A sort of light ticking that can be seen in the spectral between 10-15k. I used the pencil tool to manually remove most of these.
The speed of 'The Man' is generally less than 1% off so I chose not to subject it to a SpC/resample. "The Journey' and the encore STC are running about 1.2% slow so I adjusted the speed on these tracks only.
The Man
01. [02:53] Daybreak (Part 1)
02. [01:06] Work
03. [02:45] Afternoon
04. [03:33] Doing It!
05. [05:30] Sleeping
06. [07:45] Nightmare
07. [01:50] Daybreak (Part 2)
The Journey
08. [03:20] The Beginning
09. [07:27] Beset By the Creatures of the Deep
10. [05:34] The Narrow Way
11. [01:53] Behold the Temple of Light
12. [08:11] The End of the Beginning
Encore
13. [11:42] Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun
[63:36] Total
Lord Snooty Tape Transfer/ Little Pieces Production (LPP) / Arrangements by Neonknight (April 2010)
*******************************************************************************************************