Pink Floyd
Civic Auditorium
Santa Monica, California, USA
16 October 1971
01 Careful With That Axe, Eugene
02 Fat Old Sun
03 Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
04 Atom Heart Mother
05 The Embryo
06 Cymbaline
07 Blues
08 Echoes
09 A Saucerful Of Secrets
*Lineage*
*PA recorder:
"Pink Floyd Santa Monica 1971 soundboard reel to reel" Ebay find supported privately by members of the Y! community
1/4” 7” open reel with mono program in both channels. The right channel is much stronger and higher fidelity. This is telltale of an originally mono recorded tape played back on a stereo machine. The single magnetic stripe on the tape ends up more under one channel in the stereo head than the other.
This sounds like a microphone placed in front or very close to one of the front main PA speakers. There are telltale “soundboard recording” elements - but as captured nearly directly from the speaker with a mic instead of plugged in directly. There are also open room sounds and nearby people. There is a layer of saturation like you might expect from recording a PA speaker with a 1960’s dictation quality recorder and mic. At the same time this preserves an up close detailed and dynamic capture vs distant audience recording sound. Calling this a soundboard would have been an honest mistake since the sound is recorded nearly directly from the PA speaker connected to the soundboard. It sounds more soundboard-like than not. The open room sounds and conversation give it away that it isn't.
The song order on the reel:
Side A - AHM, Embryo, Cymbaline, 1.7 sec fragment of beginning of STC, filler
Side B - CWTAE, FOS, STC, tuning and announcement fragment, Blues (incomplete), filler
The reel was likely left spooled to side B. The evidence here further indicates this reel to be a generational copy itself. The STC fragment and the complete STC (complete on “side B”) are on opposite sides of the tape. Blues is on the opposite side it should be and there is remaining tape space after it cuts off (that was then recorded with filler).
Three transfers were made of the reel.
Unknown studio
This transfer has almost no low end and extra saturation on the highs and high mids. This was likely done in the early digital age with a hardware CDr recorder or DAT deck. Telltales being 16 bit file format and the blurred but edgy at the same time sound of the AD converters in those machines.
This transfer has the most stable high end of the 3.
Mystery Room
This transfer nailed the azimuth and has the best tape transport stability. A very high level of expertise showing there. Something went wrong however. The sound is washed out with extreme low levels and no high end at all. Something awkward like an errant playback eq setting on the deck perhaps. It’s also possible that this is a striking example of the original recorded magnetic stripe being out of alignment and a textbook playback alignment missing the mark. Or a little of both. I suspect more the former.
That being said, this transfer still contains the best low end.
A_L
This transfer sounds the most overall correct out of the box. There is a tape flatness issue that was beyond the ability of the playback deck transport resulting in high end wow and flutter. This transfer has the best low mid thru high mid sound and is free of the added saturation in the original unknown studio transfer.
*Audience recorder:
Pink Floyd 1971-10-16 Santa Monica, low gen HG tape [24-96]
Low gen TDK SA90 cassettes (1987-89) > Technics RS-565 > Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 > Reaper v4.61 > FLAC (24bit/96kHz)
The audience recording comes from somewhere in the middle of the room. No one surround speaker stack is more discernible or in close proximity.
*Neonknight’s original notes*
Pinkrudy's cassettes have better high end than other versions I have heard and are not affected by the low end hum that is present on the 1st gen that most people reading this will have in their collection. The sound is also more airy and you can hear greater detail.
The recording was made by Al who was 15 or 16 at the time, so all credit to him for doing such a good job. When the concert first surfaced in 1985 Al was very generous in sharing it, so there could be a number of different sources doing the rounds.
The song order on the tapes and speed corrections are as follows:
Side A - CWTAE/FOS +3.36%, Embryo +2.47%
Side B - Cymbaline +1.58%, Blues +1.29%, Echoes (part 1) +2.47%
Side C - Echoes (part 2) +4.83%, ASOS +3.97%, STC +3.67%
Side D - AHM +3.08%
Howard Gil tape supplied by pinkrudy / Neonknight tape transfer, May 2016
*Mastering*
Mastered with Reaper DAW with iZotope, Waves, and Universal Audio plugins. The reel source - being a recording of the main PA and thus almost soundboard like - plus an audience recording from out in the room reinforce each other well if combined. This requires very precise sync alignment between sources which is easily handled with lossless Elastique Pro veri-speed pitch/time correction in Reaper. The right channel alone of each recording is used here. The left channels offered no extended content or fidelity for either recording.
You hear the sound of the close drum mics on the snare and toms in the PA speaker recording while the cymbals are far away. (Cymbals are often un-mic’d because they project in the room by themselves and they’re actually already a problem bleeding into the vocal mics.) Vocals and guitar are up close and detailed. The room recording has present cymbals and more keys/organ especially as it projected from the surround speakers. Some elements of their surround in motion mixing are preserved between the two recordings especially in STCFTHOTS and Cymbaline.
The choice between the original transfer and the A_L transfer is difficult. Using both together would be a magical best case but would only be possible if the sync between them could be made perfect. Even the slightest slightest drift between copies from the same original source will flange. If you get them to 99% sync with Elastique Pro in a DAW, sometimes you can get lucky with iZotope RX adaptive azimuth correction and it nails it. This was one of those lucky times. I was able to blend between the 3 transfers of the PA speaker recording reel for the most complete fidelity.
The 5.1 surround presentation in this master has the mono PA recorder front L,R and the audience recorder rear L,R. The center channel is a blend of the mono PA recorder with isolated cymbals from the audience recorder to put Nick’s drum kit back together front and center and then have the (mono remains of) the PA speakers firing front L,R. The audience recorder brings up the room from the rears. There’s certainly more missing with the surround than preserved but some front to back motion is preserved. The stereo mix has the PA recorder just left of center 15%, the center drums centered, and the audience is harder right at 65%. The L,R pans go 100% for the featured surround parts in STC and Cymbaline to preserve the panning in stereo.
The loud section in the first track CWTAE, is overloading the recorders. It cleaned up OK-ish. The sound opens up on the 2nd track. Some genuine surround play elements captured in STC and this track comes across properly with the whispered vocals and delicate parts clearly audible. As these things often go, the PA speaker recording cuts out before the end of the show. The 2nd half of Blues, Echoes, and ASOS come form the mono audience recorder alone.
*Release formats*
2 recorder 5.1 master 24/96 & 24/48
2 recorder stereo master 24/96 & 16/44.1
PA recorder 24/96 & 16/44.1
audience recorder 24/96 & 16/44.1
Original raw PA reel transfer 16/44.1
Mystery Room raw PA reel transfer 24/96
A_L raw PA reel transfer 24/96
All FLAC level 8. Sample rate reduction for SD versions with SOX codec. 16 bit conversion with Waves IDR.
Raw versions are indexed and speed corrected (lossless) but otherwise unprocessed original digital files in the original sample format and the original stereo format with inferior left channel.
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