1993-07-31 Crystal Palace Sports Ground, London, England, UK/Source 1

BBC2's artwork.

Notes

Superb soundboard-quality audio originally mixed by Steve Lyon, who also mixed the "Devotional" film soundtrack. BBC2 provided a stream of 10 songs on November 11, 2023, with UK residents having access to a higher quality M4A 320kbps audio stream. This source is a rework which utilizes the 320kbps stream and adds in the missing songs and corrects some other flaws with the recording.

Despite this stream's lossiness, thanks to modern audio codecs, frequency response goes up to 20khz and clarity is noticeably improved over prior versions sourced from FM broadcasts or even digital satellite broadcasts from within the past decade, which were encoded with the archaic MP2 codec with frequency response barely reaching 17khz at best, and even then with quite noticeable lossy compression artifacts. This new audio source is probably as close to a "pre-FM" as we'll ever get of this recording. The auCDtectTaskManager log indicates inconclusiveness for the majority of the audio, and even has trouble determining the FM rebroadcast tracks' losslessness (perhaps due to the 19khz FM pilot tone), however great care was taken to ensure no transcodes were used and no unnecessary resampling was done during the creation of this rework.

The songs Stripped, Condemnation, Judas, and I Feel You were not included in the BBC2 audio. Additionally, about ten seconds during the middle of Enjoy The Silence where Dave says to the audience "well let's fuckin' hear you!" were removed from the BBC2 audio, and the flaw toward the end of Personal Jesus was crudely edited to include a bar from the album version of the song to bridge the gap.

To rectify this, the four missing songs, the missing segment from Enjoy The Silence, and several seconds of audience noise after Everything Counts were patched in using an FM rebroadcast DAT master generously lent to DMLiveWiki by gadget242. Unfortunately, this DAT master suffers from some spots of diginoise which were patched out using the prior rework's audio which is sourced from one of the various silver CD bootlegs of the broadcast, but this amounted to less than 5 seconds in total. The flaw toward the end of Personal Jesus was patched by a skillful recreation of the missing audio crafted by biashead; the prior rework of this audio patched the segment using an average sounding audience recording instead. Additionally, about 25 seconds at the beginning of Higher Love were patched in using a direct stream capture of an earlier digital satellite rebroadcast, captured by Stealth71.

Slight equalization to lessen the artificially boosted bass by the BBC2 stream was applied, and additional minor edits to smooth out some jarring audience noise transitions between songs and to correct a minor volume flaw at the beginning of Personal Jesus were done as well. It is interesting to note that both the volume flaw, and the glitch toward the end of Personal Jesus appear on all broadcast versions of this recording.

Both a reworked version of the FM rebroadcast DAT master which corrects diginoise where possible and patches out all DJ chatter, and a raw version of the recording will be made available in the near future for those who prefer a true lossless recording.

One other thing to note: this broadcast recording has been heavily overdubbed with the same set of Dave Gahan vocals which were recorded for overdubs of the "Devotional" soundtrack, which was recorded at the 1993-07-29 Stade Couvert Régional, Liévin, France concert. Naturally, things like Dave's banter and shouts from Crystal Palace were retained, as well as the occasional vocal which didn't appear on the "Devotional" soundtrack such as the first chorus vocal of Stripped. Personally, after learning this fact, I listen to this recording as well as the "Devotional" soundtrack far less frequently than I used to because of their inauthenticity. Audio examples of the overdubs as well as some average quality audience recordings from this concert that you can compare to are available on the main page for this concert if you are interested in further detail about this fact.

To date, the songs "World In My Eyes", "Behind The Wheel", "One Caress", "Mercy In You", and "Fly On The Windscreen" from this concert have not been broadcast. It is unknown whether they were prepared for broadcast at all.

Listen

NOTE: This audio has been re-encoded from its original format (M4A 320kbps) in order to allow streaming. Quality may be noticeably diminished compared to the original files which you can download below.

You can listen to this entire recording below.

Track list

The DAT's inlay card.

1. [6:55] Play Higher Love
2. [5:04] Play Policy Of Truth
3. [6:33] Play Walking In My Shoes
4. [4:37] Play Halo
5. [5:00] Play Stripped
6. [3:48] Play Condemnation
7. [5:08] Play Judas (*)
8. [7:11] Play I Feel You
9. [4:51] Play Never Let Me Down Again
10. [4:39] Play Rush
11. [6:41] Play In Your Room
12. [5:45] Play Personal Jesus
13. [6:42] Play Enjoy The Silence
14. [5:12] Play Everything Counts

• Total time: 1:18:06

Lineage

The FM rebroadcast DAT master.

• Lineage (BBC2 audio), captured by DMRobo:
  • BBC Sounds higher bitrate UK-specific webstream -> M4A 320kbps 48khz (direct capture)
• Lineage (FM rebroadcast DAT master), contributed by gadget242:
  • unknown FM tuner -> unknown DAT deck recording at 16/48 -> Maxell DM 120 DAT -> Seagate CTD-8000 SCSI DAT drive -> dat2wav v1.3b software -> WAV (16/48)
• Lineage (digital satellite rebroadcast - used for 25 seconds of Higher Love), captured by Stealth71 circa 2013:
  • digital satellite (DVB-S) broadcast -> Humax Foxsat HDR -> PC -> MP2 (160kbps 48khz)
• Lineage (rework by DMLiveWiki):
  • in Audacity 3.4.1: slight EQ to lessen artificially boosted bass of the BBC2 audio, 4 missing songs merged in from FM rebroadcast DAT master, patch out diginoise where needed using the prior rework, iZotope RX 10 De-click where required, other small audio patches merged in, normalized to -0.1dB and any DC offset removed -> WAV (16/48) tracks -> FLAC level 8 (16/48)
• DAT photo & inlay scan, BBC2 artwork, and auCDtectTaskManager log included

Download

• Download ZIP - FLAC 16-bit 48KHz - 595.86MB