Audience/Soundboard - The Houston Music Hall tape is a 7.1 quality Audience. but it is a first generation and therefore does represent the best possible source of the concert that kicked off their 1979 tour. The bonus material is all Soundboard including the Bradford, UK. which does rate a solid 8.8 with signs of age, the US festival portion rates 9.7 being from a pristine condition transcription disc.

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 7.6 - I rate this highly because I am amazed that the taper got something this decent because it is obvious the gear is amateur and the band is LOUD as all hell. That being said, this should give you a very good idea of what you could have expected seeing this band in the early 70’s.

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

Audience 8.2 - Above average Audience recording with one very critical feature – contains perhaps the most sinister, gnarliest Hammond organ sound ever committed to tape. Just ferocious, and the band is on fire. Brilliant!

Audience 9.0 - This may have been a radio broadcast but I don’t know. It is Excellent!

Audience 8.8 - Very cool, great atmosphere!

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.

Soundboard 8.9     (4-3-79)

Audience 7.7 - Noisy but good, exciting atmosphere. The music seems to move through the audience, the audience responds, it’s kind of cool to hear.

FM Radio Broadcast 9.3

Audience/Pro? 8.7 - It sounds like this is recorded from the audience, but to my ears it sounds like it may be a television audience or in some kind of studio. It sounds like microphones were placed strategically, and there’s no ancillary noises that you would expect from a stealth audience recording.

Soundboard 8.7 - Raw, unfiltered and killer. Sure, it ain’t perfect, it is a little squishy and compressed but it’s all there, and there’s plenty of headroom if you want to add Equalizer or even some reverb would help.

Soundboard 9.3 - Of course it’s great but I am not too thrilled with the sound of the drums.

Audience 7.7 - Lo-fi but surprisingly clear with a good biting guitar tone, and solid bass. Drums kind of buried.

Audience 9.6 - Hard to tell if this is Soundboard or Audience, it is that good. My best guess is that it is a Pro Audience, very good gear - probably open reel to reel.

Various sources various quality but mostly very good stuff here and overall very good Audio as well. As far as live compilations go, I can highly recommend this one. Probably should be a must own for fans and a good starter for those first discovering them. One of my personal favorites.

FM Radio Broadcast 8.8 - Typical radio compression present, and some minor breakup during intense segments due to over-saturation but these issues are only minor ones....this is a good recording!

Audience 8.5 - A rather intimate sounding capture, maybe a touch thin, but clear and lively.

Audience 8.8 - Someone snuck in some good gear for this capture. You can just tell the mics are quality, there’s a great stereo pan, a good atmospheric capture.

Soundboard 9.8

Audience 7.2 - Kind of flat but surprisingly clear (Portchester auds tend to be notoriously distorted).

Soundboard 9.0 and Audience 8.6

Audience 7.3 - A rough document that reminds me a little bit of the Boston 1969 tape. There’s a lot of inherent noise within the bandwidth of the poor old analog tape trying to capture the sheer power of the Who in 1969, but you know it does manage to get enough that you can adjust and start to get into it. It’s raucous, yup, but so was the band!