Pink Floyd
Festhalle
Frankfurt
November 17th 1972
New High Definition transfer from Marbal's own 1st Generation Backup Reel.
Transfer and Artwork production by Beechwoods.
Mastering by Jimfisheye.
FLAC
EX+
MASTER: 24bit/96kHz stereo* FLAC
SC: 24bit/96kHz stereo* FLAC (speed corrected only - no other processing)
RAW: 24bit/96kHz mono FLAC (no processing)
CD (portable master): 16bit/44.1kHz stereo* FLAC (24/96 master > 24/44.1 > 16/44.1)
* The mono program is presented as dual mono in the stereo format. This is to avoid it playing only through the center channel of a 5.1 home theater system or a single channel of a stereo system. This does not increase the file size with FLAC compression.
Set List
01 [03:20] Speak To Me
02 [02:48] Breathe
03 [06:15] Travel Sequence
04 [06:54] Time / Breathe Reprise
05 [04:31] The Great Gig In The Sky
06 [06:00] Money
07 [07:45] Us And Them
08 [05:37] Any Colour You Like
09 [07:19] Brain Damage / Eclipse
10 [09:40] One Of These Days
11 [12:28] Careful With That Axe, Eugene
12 [24:45] Echoes
13 [12:48] Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
|| [110:16] Total
** Original Beechwoods' Notes
Marbal recorded both of the Floyd's performances at the Festhalle in Frankfurt in November 1972, on the 16th and 17th. The first show was recorded to cassette, on a mono Philips EL3302 portable recorder. On the 16th Marbal spotted that the venue had conveniently sited mains power upstairs besides the seats, so he decided to try and get his Grundig TK147 reel to reel recorder into the venue for the second night.
This transfer is named in honour of that machine, and the nerve it took to get it into the venue! It's easy to forget how big decent machines were back in the early 70's, and the difficulty in getting them into a venue. As Marbal commented on the day before 'When we ran inside the hall we kicked the security out of the way...' - a 'take no prisoners' approach to stealth recording!
It's worth saying a little about existing copies that circulate. All Marbal's cassette copies are from his 1st Gen backup reel. 'I did that during my student time to secure the quality of the 1st reel which was in my parents' house together with the machine while I had 2 cass-decks in my little flat'. Circulating cassette copies will be 2nd gen or higher.
The mastertape is sadly damaged and lost.
This particular transfer is, I hope you will agree, an extraordinary improvement on circulating copies.
** Jimfisheye's Notes
This is a mono recording of a concert presented in quadraphonic surround sound. The balance captured on tape is fairly complete considering but certain elements are far away sounding due to the mono perspective.
The recording suffers from incorrect transfer speeds, high frequency attenuation from tape degradation and generation loss and harmonic distortion from a microphone/deck just not up to the task of capturing full spectrum live loud dynamic sound. The loudest sections of music suffer further high and high mid frequency attenuation and compression.
The intent for this master is to present the concert as closely as possible to how it originally sounded with a reasonable amount of restoration work. Listening to a raw audience recording of an event made on amateur and/or portable equipment can turn into more of a study of the challenges and imperfections than the event itself. Tapes running at wrong speeds, volume levels altered by equipment response and operator controls and frequency balance altered by equipment limitations can be very large distractions. Perfectly complete restoration is not always the goal (or even always possible). There will almost certainly be some artifact left untouched or a technique employed to be scrutinised. The goals here were to restore the correct speed, offset the high frequency attenuation and correct record level fluctuations caused by level adjustments during the recording and other equipment anomalies.
The 1st half of TDSOTM is 46c flat but the rest of the show is 31c flat. This was corrected with Serato Pitch n Time. The level of harmonic distortion makes it difficult to make any adjustments without further degrading the recording. I was able to restore some balance by boosting the high frequencies. The high mids were boosted and the highs further boosted during the more compromised loud sections. All eq boosts were done by first isolating the frequency range to boost in a copy of the track and then mixing this together with the original track. This clinical approach avoids the colouration and alterations inherent in eq boosts. I used iZotope2 noise removal on the track adding back in high frequency content in order to not increase the hiss in the recording. It was not possible to remove hiss from the overall recording without losing content. I corrected the record level fluctuations and removed a number of noises from the mic and equipment being physically jostled.
Speed correction and certain isolated noise/artifact removal is fairly black and white. Acoustics of the venue, performance of the sound engineer and the nature of the quadraphonic surround sound mixing present a lot of variables. Add portable recording equipment to this (and these levels moving around especially at the beginning of the show) and frequency balance and level correction become more subjective. Although this recording is far from audiophile or even portable consumer standards, the fragile nature of its remains actually require a full quality digital format to preserve without incurring further loss. With this in mind and to preserve raw data for future technology, the raw digital transfer and a speed corrected only version are included with the mastered version of this recording.
This show gets off to a rough start as well. Rick's keys are flat at first. (Power issues affecting Ricks tuning?) They seem painfully aware they are out of tune and are just trying to get through it. You can hear it in their playing. Sounds like everything's under control again by the end of Time.
Marbal Tape / Beechwoods Transfer / Jimfisheye Mastering
September 2012
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Part 1
Part 2
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