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Audience 8.4 - I expected more from a post 2000 audience recording, but this one is decend just seems to be toward the back of the hall. You do get all instruments, and mixed properly, with pretty much Eddie and DLR being the clearest and out front. Solos sound good as they seem to swirl around the room giving it a cool atmosphere. The show does seem to get better as it goes, might even boost the rating another .3 for the slight improvement.
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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.
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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.
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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.