Audience 8.8 - Aww yeah! This is the stuff. Great sound!

Audience 7.0 -7.3 - Why the funky rating? Because what started out as a dismal audience tape has slowly over the years morphed into a listenable show. Why would you care? Because 1978 shows KILL! If you loved and miss the vintage Eddie Van Halen signature between riff fills that he used to dish out effortlessly, than get this one because later he began relying too much on tried and true signature frills and less and less on inventing killer little hooky lead fills on the spot. This show has them, and you can hear them, and it’s weird because this tape has a very strange dynamic to it where the sound channel down the middle opens up enough to let Eddie’s sound permeate and even float around a little above the din of the bass and kick. So the re-mastering addressed some of that by dropping some of the low and low mid boom and attenuating the upper mids and highs with multi-band compression. It helped a lot. Still kind of rough but actually the show is so interesting and just enough above being not listenable that it will still suck you right in and you will actually play it all the way through. I promise that. I did, without regrets.

Audience 8.7 - Some harshness on the cymbals, but I’d rather have those highs intact because it is easier to round off than try and crank them up if they don’t exist.

Pro Soundboard 9.1 - Recorded for broadcast in a studio setting so you know it is going to be really good. Tape is just a touch “aged” in that it is not as bright as you would expect but still darn good.