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Audience 8.8 -
Audience 8.2 -
Audience 8.7 - Pretty straightforward recording, has good center balance, good mix, everything loud and clear and makes for a pretty enjoyable listen. -
Audience 8.7 - Nothing offensive here, a capture with more than enough headroom to EQ to taste, which shows me the tapers knew what they were doing with the levels. Thank you. -
Audience 8.9 - A beautifully warm, tight sound. Great capture here! -
Audience 9.4 - Thankfully the final show of their last Tour features a superbly captured tape with good tight sound. -
Audience 9.4 - One of the most exciting tapes, the sound leaps at you in amazing clarity and detail where you just get the sense that you are right there watching the gig. Great job by the taper, wish I could thank them personally. -
Audience 8.4 - Captures the PA sound in reasonable quality, as if you are midway back on floor, so you do get the special aspect, you get some hall verb for sure but I have heard worse. -
Audience 9.5 - Spectacular! I mean there are times when you’d swear it was a board. This is a must have! -
Audience 8.8 - Pretty good sound especially if you want to focus on Geddy’s playing. -
Audience 8.8 - Not all the 2015 shows were recorded by folks who understand where to sit and how to get levels, these guys did, thank goodness! -
Audience 8.8 - Warm sound, leveled off somewhere in the upper mid and stays there…with quality. -
Audience 8.8 - Everything is where it should be in this sound mix except I find Geddy’s vocals just a hair behind but it does not bother me at all. In fact this mix allows me to appreciate more of the bass and guitar playing. Really good stuff here! -
Audience? Hard to tell if this is an audience or soundboard, it is really good. If it is audience, then it was done very close to the mains but no distortion at all, but I doubt that because there is very precise stereo panning on some of the effects (such as intro to 2112). If it is a soundboard, it is a good one because it allows some bleeding in of the crowd and atmosphere. -
Audience 8.9 - This recording gives off a sense of massive power with Geddy’s bass sound being huge and round and dead on – with a great open expanse overhead allowing the music to breathe a little. This atmosphere allows the music to sometimes move around in the stereo field a little which is nice. I like this kind of recording when it comes to the larger venues. -
CD 1 - Soundboard 8.6 - Sounds very low gen but the tape seems somewhat compressed, but very clean, and thankfully can be turned up loud without breaking up. CD 2 - Soundboard 8.6 - A lot like disc one, occasional phasing on one or two tracks, but again it is pretty clean and a mix that reveals how good each player is in this band. CD 3 - Soundboard 8.4 - A step down from the first couple of discs but it has a little more brightness to it, and a little more noise and a strange sort of echo on the guitar which does not bother me, it is just different than the other discs. All in all, collectors will find much to like here. -
CD 1 - Audience 7.4 - A much better source tape here for this show, sounds a lot better than I remember it being. It’s still somewhat thin, but the bass guitar is very clear note-wise, just do not expect slamming bottom end. The second show on CD 1 is Soundboard 9.4 - Superb! CD 2 - Audience 7.4 - Similar to the Portland show, with more emphasis on drums, less clarity in the total mix- but heavier low end. CD 3 - All Radio Broadcast 8.8 -
Audience 9.3 - Very well placed mic allows the perfect balance of instruments in a setting that seems to breath, there’s space for the music and the audience to provide ideal atmosphere and balance. -
Audience 8.6 - With the shortage of recordings spanning 2016 to now, anything is welcome including this rather spacious sounding capture. Bigger on atmosphere than super focused instruments, the vocals ring loud and clear but guitar chimes behind most of it all. Still, rather good, and I will take that! -
Audience 9.1 - Thrilling capture! Gives you excellent mid band punch, and really clear, direct to ears sonics -
Audience 8.7 - What you get here is a lot of large stadium ambiance, actual recording is pretty realistic from around the middle of the venue – not overpowering and good, clear, loud enough to get a sense of the event and of actually being there. It’s good – it’s not overwhelming – just good. Not a lot of 2016 tapes out there so I like having yet another one since the band played different songs at every venue. -
All Soundboard and all about 9.2 to 9.4 -
Soundboard 9.8 -
Soundboard 8.8 - A little tape hiss present but a good board with my only issue being a lack of purity in the mix, somewhat muddy for a soundboard but it has a high rating due to the overall enjoyability. -
9.5 - Professionally recorded with a mobile truck, open mic direct to reel to reel. Difficult to accurately describe this, you could call it so many things. Uli Trepte was the bassist in Krautrockers Guru Guru, this is what he did after that. I should say “after his brain cells all waved bye bye” because this Spacebox stuff is about as “out there” as “music” can possibly get. -
Audience 8.1 - Do not be dismayed by this sound rating, in fact this has been re-mastered and is vastly superior to all other versions out there. The lineage of this recording was the cause of some confusion for decades – it was believed to have been from Rotterdam but is in fact Amsterdam. Why this show has been overlooked by collectors is beyond me, it’s a marathon concert and should be in the collection. Maybe it was the marginal sound quality of previous versions? Oh well, now we have this. -
Pro 9.0 - Everything in this set is very good to excellent, sounds mostly all Soundboard too. What a peculiar band, interesting, intense, angular (see title). -
Audience 9.2 - The final performance of the 4 night Halloween Marathon at the Palladium in NYC 1978. Also part of the FZ Halloween Canister, also being offered. -
CD 1 - Audience 8.4 - Surprisingly good, I’d never had this one in my collection until recently and I enjoyed it. CD 2 - Audience 8.7 - A very strong contender to be one of the best ’71 Audience tapes (along with the Copenhagen show). CD 3 - Audience 7.5 - The weaker of the three shows in this set, but it’s not crap, just not super clear or dynamic. A show your ears will adjust to, and you’ll have it in your collection all wrapped up in a nice package. A set that I recommend to get your fix on less common but good early performances. -
Soundboard and Audience 8.7 – 8.6 – 8.4 - The first two discs are soundboard but show signs of age and lack brightness although both are clear. Disc 1 sounds like it was broadcast over the air, and is slightly better than disc 2. Disc 3 is an audience recording that sometimes peaks in volume causing some high end distortion (mainly present in the cymbal crashes) but is not bad overall.
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Soundboard 9.1 and Audience 8.5 - Beautifully mixed, with some tiny over-sizzle on crash cymbals at times, which seems to get worked out on the mix, but more problems with vocals getting distorted, mostly is the “ssss’s” which isn’t a deal breaker because the problems are not a large percentage of the music. The second show is an audience recording that sounds a little distant until the guitars begin and then it sounds practically right next to you! Strange. -
Audience 8.6 - A serviceable recording that I am thankful to have in that it captures an exceptional night where the band is simply on another level, especially Ronnie James Dio. The dynamics do not impress, and there’s a lot packed into that upper mid band frequency which is barely hanging on but the good news is that it does hang on, and you do get pretty much everything in a reasonably comfortable way. I welcomed this one, and the bonus is that taper recorded the opening act too, which is included here for completeness.