1984-11-02 Hammersmith Odeon, London, England, UK/Source 3

Notes

A very good FM broadcast recording. The previous transfer of this recording was a little bass heavy and had a sort of "breathing" effect to them due to Dolby mistracking. This retransfer was done on the final high-end cassette deck Nakamichi manufactured versus a Sony Walkman Pro that was, according to the taper, "past its best". It is a big upgrade in sound quality and sounds significantly better overall. Bass is improved, all high frequencies are present as they should be, there is significantly less wow & flutter, and there are no Dolby mistracking artifacts. The only thing I had to do to the audio was adjust the speed and apply a bit of normalization to even out the channels somewhat. Thanks for your effort in retransferring your original tape and for providing a high-resolution 24/96 transfer, twosheds!

This FM broadcast included Blasphemous Rumours which is not found on the BBC pre-FM promotional vinyl, but misses "Something To Do" and "Puppets" which are present on that vinyl. I have read that there was another radio broadcast which included "Puppets", but a recording of that broadcast has not surfaced yet. Nonetheless, "Puppets" can be found on the pre-FM vinyl, so it is not a big loss. If You Want fades in and misses the very beginning of the intro ambiance before the song begins. Everything Counts is missing the first couple seconds, apparently due to bad cueing at the radio station.

Other recordings from this concert exist:

• 1984-11-03 Hammersmith Odeon, London, England, UK/Source 1: CD bootleg "A Quick One", stellar rip of pre-FM vinyl of 12 tracks from a bootleg pressing of the BBC promotional vinyl
• 1984-11-03 Hammersmith Odeon, London, England, UK/Source 2: 17.5-track soundboard recording, rather muffled and missing the last three tracks

Please note that there is contention regarding the true date of this audio. This FM broadcast as well as the 17.5-track soundboard recording are labelled as 1984-11-02, but depmod.com claims this London audio as being from 1984-11-03. The audio from all three sources (pre-FM vinyl and its "A Quick One" CD bootleg, this FM broadcast recording, and the 17.5-track soundboard recording) all match, so the only question is the date. There are no cuesheet scans from the original BBC pre-FM promotional vinyl and no recording of any radio announcer mentioning the date of the concert. I have asked Brat (webmaster of depechemode.com) but he does not have a copy of the original pressing vinyl including cuesheet, nor does he have any leads on tracking down the correct info and management would be of no help either. PeterToo's tape of the 17.5 track soundboard is labelled 1984-11-02, and twoshed's FM broadcast tape is labelled 1984-11-02 (info retrieved from an old section on BBC's website, unfortunately not even available on archive.org - but BBC's site does not have a perfect track record for accuracy). The only question is where depmod.com obtained 1984-11-03 as the date. I've requested scans of the original cuesheet, but nobody has come forth with any so far. Thus, for the time being, I will label this audio as 1984-11-03 until proof can be furnished confirming the date. In my eyes, that will be the original cuesheet that was with the BBC original pressing vinyl.

Listen

You can listen to this entire recording below.

Track list

1. [5:18] Play If You Want
2. [4:15] Play People Are People
3. [5:00] Play Leave In Silence
4. [5:08] Play Somebody (*)
5. [3:47] Play Ice Machine
6. [5:30] Play Lie To Me
7. [5:26] Play Blasphemous Rumours
8. [5:16] Play Master And Servant
9. [4:24] Play Photographic
10. [6:25] Play Everything Counts
11. [4:41] Play See You

• Total time: 55:08

Lineage

• Complete FM broadcast recording
• Lineage: NAD 4020 Tuner or possibly a Yamaha (unknown model) -> Naim 32.5 preamp -> Nakamichi BX-100E (Dolby B on) -> Sony BHF 120 normal position cassette -> Nakamichi DR-10 cassette deck (Dolby B on) -> Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD USB -> Audacity (24/96 capture) -> dBpoweramp -> FLAC (level 5) -> in Adobe Audition CC 2015: speed adjusted 2.0% to 2.25% (start and end), channels independently normalized to -0.1dB and any DC bias removed -> WAV (24/96) -> tracked using Audacity 2.1.1 -> WAV (24/96) tracks -> FLAC 24-bit 96khz using FLAC 1.3.1 64-bit (level 8 compression) and foobar2000 v1.3.8
• Taper: twosheds
• Generation: master; tape retransferred by twosheds on May 7, 2015 and shared on DIME May 11, 2015
• auCDtectTaskManager log included
• Originally broadcast 1984-12-01

Download

• Download via torrent - FLAC 16-bit 44.1khz - 365MB
• Download via torrent - FLAC 24-bit 96khz - 1.15GB