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John H's Collection

Electric Light Orchestra   09/27/1974

Rhein-Neckar-Halle, Eppelheim, West Germany
Source audience
Media flac   1 disc
Notes 'The Great Music Festival' was a rock concert festival in September 1974 with shows at two locations, the Rhein-Neckar-Halle in Heidelberg-Eppelheim and the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund, both with more or less the same line-up.

Some background information first:
Last Autumn I visited my old friend HB in Mannheim who had recorded close to 200 concerts in the Mannheim/Frankfurt area from 1970 until about 1975. He used a portable RtR mono tape recorder with a single external mono microphone but copied his masters onto 18cm reels when back at home after the shows, as tapes were expensive at the time and archiving this way was cheaper than keeping the master tape of every show. Speaking to several tapers of the time, this must have been fairly common practise. Compact Cassettes were considered cheap and unreliable at the time. Over the years he copied some of his back-up masters onto cassette tapes as the quality of these had improved dramatically by the late seventies and they were easier to handle. Later on copies of the reels were also made with a DAT recorder, but I'm not sure on the whereabouts of these. Fortunately HB was wise enough to keep his RtR back-up tapes.
The shows he recorded back then covered nearly all genres from Rock to Jazz, including Led Zeppelin, ELP, Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and even Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Blood, Sweat and Tears and many many more.
So when I arrived at his appartment in Mannheim on a Saturday lunchtime he had a huge cardboard box of reels on the floor of his living room and he gave me the whole lot for a fresh digital transfer.

Digital transfer done by myself with my revised Revox and my MixPre3 for very best results..

HB's back-up master tape reel to reel, Tape #22, Side 1, Track 1

Original Recording Equipment: mobile RtR recorder, most probably a Telefunken 300TS halftrack mono , maybe with the single external microphone TD33 with balance input control.
Source Master Tape: Unknown, probably 13cm BASF or Shamrock RtR (wiped when re-used later)
Original back-up Tape: 18cm BASF, AGFA or Shamrock RtR 1/4 Track mono
Playback Tape Deck: Revox A77 on 1/4 track mono, 9.5cm per minute
Digital Recorder: Sound Devices MixPre3
Manual azimuth alignment (with mono headphone output setting on the MixPre 3 - which in most cases enables pinpoint accuracy)
Audacity: edited, normalised and de-noised
iZotope RX9: Kirchhoff EQ plus Brainworx bx Stereomaker plug in
Trades Allowed Yes   Traded from: Filefactory
Ratings Show: A-    Sound: A-
Lists Main List A to E
Owned by John H · Last Updated Dec 20, 2023