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1994-03-26 Blaisdell Arena, Honolulu, HI, USA/Source 2

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Notes

This is an excellent soundboard recording. Jon was the house monitor engineer for this concert (and the concert the night before), and these tapes served as Jon's personal listening copy, as he copied the original master DAT onto 2x60 minute DAT tapes.

Jon added crowd noise taken from a couple of minutes toward the end of the concert to the song intros. He also added it at other spots in songs where a crowd response would be expected, aiming to create a more 'live' feel to the sound. Please don't give Jon too much hassle for adding the crowd noise; he made this copy as a personal listening copy and didn't expect that these tapes would be important decades later.

Personally, the added crowd noise is not my cup of tea, as I'm used to hearing the unedited soundboard. I also feel that the crowd noise can be too loud in general, particularly during song intros. However, unlike the "fake" crowd noise, which is commonly found on Westwood One live releases for example, the crowd noise in this recording was added to appropriate points in the songs, and generally it was tastefully done.

Overall, sound quality of the music is significantly improved over the other available versions of this recording, which are sourced from commercial bootlegs and have significant and harsh-sounding equalization applied. These versions also seem to have lossy compression applied, likely due to them being sourced from DATs recorded in LP mode, or perhaps had MiniDisc in the lineage. On this version, there is ample amounts of dynamic range, no harsh equalization, and the frequency response extends right up to 20kHz, as expected, making it truly lossless. auCDtectTaskManager's results are inconclusive, but I believe the strong 20khz tone is confusing its CDDA detection algorithm.

"Rush" is missing on the original recording for an unknown reason and is missing here as a result. The incomplete copy of "Halo", present on Source 1, is not included on this copy; it is unknown whether this was intentional because the song is incomplete, or whether it was due to time constraints of the first 60-minute DAT tape.

A bit of audience noise and Dave's utterances between I Feel You and Personal Jesus are not present due to tape change and the associated fades. This copy of the recording is the only version to include the first note of Somebody. Dave's short speech after A Question Of Time, where he says "thank you very much, good night", is not present on this tape copy.

Jon remembers having seen Daryl Bamonte playing keyboards behind the curtain near the exit (around 25 feet from the stage area). Daryl was practicing at the time to take over for Andrew Fletcher, who decided to discontinue touring with the band for the remainder of the Exotic tour after these two Hawaii concerts. Some more information regarding his tour departure can be found on the main wiki page for this concert.

Jon also recalls seeing Martin's young daughter, Viva, on stage for the soundcheck. According to the BONG Magazine issue #20 from April 1994, Viva also appeared on stage during A Question Of Time at this concert (quote from the magazine is also on the concert's main wiki page). Dave jokingly announces to the audience that "we have a new member" after the first chorus of the song.

In reference to the band's backing tapes, Jon also mentioned: "When we were setting up, [Depeche Mode's] crew brought in 2 24 track machines. I said, 'are you recording the show', they said 'no, this IS the show'".

It was previously believed that Louis Leal was the taper of this concert. Jon disputes whether Louis Leal is the taper of this concert and does not believe that Louis was involved with creating this recording. Considering that Jon was able to provide a wealth of detail about the lineage of this recording, I believe him completely.

Jon stated that the previous night's concert in Honolulu was recorded, however "microphone input" was accidentally used on the Denon portable DAT recorder. This caused significant distortion because the input signal was overloaded; due to the unlistenable quality of the resulting recording, the DAT tape was recorded over for the second night. Jon is unsure why the second night's master tape is incomplete, with "Rush" missing entirely and "Halo" starting about halfway through.

Please also see Source 1, which is a more complete source, and which doesn't have any additional crowd noise added, but has generally worse sound for the reasons described earlier above.

I would like to thank Jon for his generosity with sending these tapes for preservation and for sharing his memories about this concert, and "ribcage" from the Depeche Mode Live Wiki Discord for pointing out Jon's comment on a YouTube video of another variant of this audio that led me to contact him.

I am still working on tracking down the original master DAT for proper preservation of this fantastic recording. Although Jon was responsible for originally recording this, he is not currently in possession of the master tape, and only had this altered DAT copy. Please stay tuned for updates.

Listen

You can listen to this entire recording below.

Track list

  1. [5:26] Play Behind The Wheel
  2. [4:43] Play Everything Counts
  3. [6:28] Play World In My Eyes
  4. [6:31] Play Walking In My Shoes
  5. [5:21] Play Stripped
  6. [3:57] Play Condemnation (*)
  7. [4:42] Play A Question Of Lust (*)
  8. [4:48] Play I Want You Now (*)
  9. [6:40] Play In Your Room
  10. [5:00] Play Never Let Me Down Again
  11. [7:18] Play I Feel You
  12. [5:46] Play Personal Jesus
  13. [4:11] Play Somebody (*)
  14. [6:59] Play Enjoy The Silence
  15. [5:09] Play Policy Of Truth
  16. [4:27] Play A Question Of Time
  • Total time: 1:27:26

Lineage

The source DATs.
  • Yamaha PM3000 mixing desk -> 2 return lines which were ran through the main snake to stage right, under the stage -> XLR to RCA adapters then an RCA to 3.5mm mini-jack adapter -> Denon portable DAT deck (unknown model) sitting on top of amplifier racks -> probably a TDK DAT -> 2x Ampex 467 R-60 60-minute "Mastering Audio Cassette" DAT tapes - digital clone, with crowd noise from the concert added in certain spots -> Sony SDT-9000 SCSI DDS tape drive -> WaveDAT software -> WAV (16/48) -> in Audacity 3.4.2: DC offset removed, normalized to -0.1dB, a bit of crossfades added between encore gaps, manual click removal where required, track splits -> FLAC level 8 (16/48)
  • Taper: Jon (house monitoring engineer)
  • Generation: first-generation DAT clone
  • Transfer: DMLiveWiki
  • Photo of DATs, ticket stub scan (thanks to Falko Nauert), concert poster photo, and auCDtectTaskManager log included

Download

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