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Audience 7.4 - History has shown that most recordings originating from the UK’s Brighton Dome are pretty bad, this one seems to be on the better side of bad. It’s quite listenable if not somewhat muddy and not the clearest ever, but once your ears adjust, and if you add some treble to it, it’s fine.
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Audience 8.8 - A very atmospheric recording that gives you an amazing sense of space and proximity to the action. The music has room to move around, so it’s a natural sounding recording and the listening experience benefits greatly. Sometimes at full volume when the band is really cooking, the music gets a little bunched up but the tapers were good with levels so it does not offend and I appreciate that. This is a real gem!
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Foghat 7.4 ~ Robin Trower 7.5 ... Interesting concept, including the opening act and headliner in a 2 disc set - but it makes sense to me and it works spectacularly here. The quality is decent, I rate conservatively, you can really sink your ears (and teeth) into both sets but I give the slight edge to Trower's set as he was headlining and therefore probably got better service from sound guy.
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CD 1 - FM Radio Broadcast 8.8 - A bit of tape hiss is present but this is a great great show! Lovely performance and decent sound. CD 2 - Audience 7.9 - A tape that went from a dismal 7.2 rating to a very decent 7.9 thanks to some painstaking mastering and restoration work. It was unbelievably hissy but that was mostly removed without sacrificing anything. Comparison was made and the results speak for themselves.
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Audience 7.6 - Obviously taken from a master tape, it’s a good recording that suffers from some kind of sonic limitation with the mic itself judging by the sort of squashed sound and slightly annoying quality to the timbre. Technically speaking the show is well captured and depending on one’s tolerance to the particular offending frequency, can be quite enjoyable (use an EQ to notch out the bad frequency).
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Audience 8.7 - A good and clear sounding tape here, some very minor crackle noise now and then but that is quibbling. This is a great tape, limited only by typical analog tape sonic limitation (where it kind of narrows the bandwidth of the entire frequency range, although it is clear, it lacks that hi-fi punch).