1986-04-10 N.E.C., Birmingham, England, UK/Source 2

Notes

An excellent quality FM broadcast capture of a 1991 Swiss radio re-broadcast, recorded directly to DAT tape. The sound quality is consistent throughout, with only minor radio interference noises occasionally heard, most noticeably during It's Called A Heart. Most clicks and pops were manually removed during the editing process.

Some DJ chatter and station jingles can be heard between songs, but they are generally not too distracting. The intros for Black Celebration and It's Called A Heart are cut to keep the broadcast duration under one hour. Additionally, the first bar of Everything Counts is missing, and Stripped and Something To Do are also missing their beginning notes.

The tape inlay states that the broadcast was on January 26, 1991, but there is no evidence in the online Swiss newspaper archives of a Depeche Mode broadcast on this date. However, there is a mention of a DM broadcast on September 14, 1991. Therefore, it is likely that the earlier date on the inlay refers to one of the other FM broadcast recordings present on the DAT tape.

The auCDtectTaskManager claims the audio is MPEG (or fails with question marks for some tracks), but the presence of the 19kHz FM stereo pilot tone is likely confusing its detection algorithms. Manual analysis of the spectrogram confirms that the audio is lossless.

This is the unedited version of the Swiss radio broadcast audio. A rework, which uses this DAT source for most of the recording combined with audio from an earlier Japanese radio broadcast to restore missing audio from the rebroadcast and eliminate DJ chatter, is available as Source 1, and is highly recommended over this version.

Additionally, a freshly remastered version of the aforementioned Japanese FM broadcast recording is available as Source 3.

Many thanks to subwave collection CH for recording this broadcast to DAT, to Vince for his assistance with securing this tape, and to DMRobo and Robert for helping with quality checks.

Listen

You can listen to this entire recording below.

Track list

The DAT tape's inlay card.

1. [0:51] Play Radio Intro
2. [4:17] Play Black Celebration
3. [4:18] Play A Question Of Time
4. [4:59] Play Shake The Disease
5. [4:53] Play It's Called A Heart
6. [0:58] Play DJ Chatter
7. [5:25] Play Everything Counts
8. [2:47] Play It Doesn't Matter Two (*)
9. [4:09] Play A Question Of Lust (*)
10. [5:21] Play Blasphemous Rumours
11. [0:49] Play DJ Chatter
12. [6:18] Play Stripped
13. [3:50] Play Something To Do
14. [5:10] Play Master And Servant
15. [4:12] Play People Are People
16. [0:48] Play Radio Outro

• Total time: 59:05

Lineage

The source DAT tape.

• Swiss Radio DRS3 broadcast on September 14, 1991 (according to newspaper archive) -> FM radio tuner (unknown model) -> equalizer (unknown model) -> DAT deck (unknown model), recording at 16-bit 48khz -> JVC R90 DAT master -> Sony SDT-9000 SCSI tape drive -> WaveDAT software -> WAV 16/48 -> in REAPER: slight EQ to lessen boomy bass and slight treble boost, manual iZotope RX 10 De-click as required, normalization, track splits -> FLAC level 8 (16/48)
• Generation: master
• Taper: subwave collection CH
• Transfer: DMLiveWiki on May 29, 2023
• DAT photo, inlay scan, and auCDtectTaskManager log included

Download

• Download ZIP - FLAC 16-bit 48KHz - 399.77MB