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david's Collection

U2   04/28/2001

America West Arena, Phoenix, AZ
Source ALD / Audience
Media CD-R   2 discs
Notes U2 Elevation Tour

April 28, 2001

America West Arena

Phoenix, Arizona



Birdman's ALD/AUD Mix



Created from two excellent SHN sources:



1) Taper: Brad Gardner <millsu2@yahoo.com>

Source: ALD > MD



2) Taper: Unknown

Source: Schoeps mk4 (in hat) > brbox > sbm-1 > M1 > CD-R >

EAC (Secure Mode) > WAV > mkwACT > SHN

Quality: Excellent Audience





Discs follow the track listing of the original AUD source, because I love Keith's covers for the

Elevation tour at keith.hispeed.com/u2/atyclb/liners.htm.





Disc One

--------

01 Intro / Elevation / In God's Country (snippet)

02 Beautiful Day

03 Until The End Of The World

04 New Year's Day

05 Kite

06 New York

07 I Will Follow

08 Sunday Bloody Sunday

09 Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of / Band Introduction

10 In A Little While

11 Stay (Faraway, So Close!)



Disc Two

--------

01 Bad

02 Where The Streets Have No Name

03 Mysterious Ways

04 The Fly

05 Bullet The Blue Sky Intro

06 Bullet The Blue Sky

07 With Or Without You

08 Pride (In The Name Of Love)

09 One

10 I Remember You

11 Walk On



Notes: So why would I spend weeks getting this mix just right? Who cares? Well,

if there's one thing I've learned in the last few years of trading Springsteen

and U2, you can never have too many good shows in your collection. :-)



Another thing I have learned, is that ALDs, by in large, are crap Nothing sounds

worse, IMHO, than a pure ALD recording - and so it should - remember the purpose

is to help hearing impaired individuals hear mid to high end sound. As bad as they

sound though, ALDs are great for one thing though - enhancing already good audience

recordings!



When I started collecting U2, and I asked people what the best recordings were from

the Elevation tour, and many pointed me to the 05-03 Cleveland show - the ALD/AUD

mix known as the "Cleveland Tea Party." For the most part, I agree. CTP is a great mix,

but not without issues. I disliked the fact that in some places, there are significantly

loud crowd reactions, bad singers, yellers, screamers... I thought of recreating the mix

from scratch to see if I could improve upon it, then figured I'd try a different show and

see what happened... This is the result.



04-28 is a great show to experiment with. The audience recording is almost perfect,

with almost no fallouts or imperfections. This makes mixing infinatly easier. The ALD

however is full of dropouts and digital noise, and that makes it infinitetly harder.

In all, I think it worked out evenly.



The ALD for this show is incomplete as well - the last 3 songs are missing. At first I

thought it was kind of stupid to go to all this trouble and fall 3 songs short of a

complete show, but after listening to the last 3 songs, and doing a bit of remastering

on them, it's almost hard to tell they aren't mixed with ALD.



The ALD issues were mostly solved by experiment, but here's some of the things I used

to get this as clean as possible:



First off, all tracks are converted to 32 bit. All editing is done in 32, then the tracks

are mixed down to 16 bit. All this does is minimize the digital noise created by some of

the editing procedures. Remember this if you ever try it yourself.. ALD tracks are also

all run through a hiss reduction process, as almost all tracks had some form of background hiss.



Digital artifacts were removed by a noise reduction filter that looks only for digital

noise. There were 2 songs on this recording that were pure shite. The worst, was UTEOTW.

My god what a mess. After removing digital noise, there was still parts of the song where

the music was destroyed, and had to be recreated from scratch. I did this using various

techniques, including:



- use an advance digital noise filter, and increase the volume on the filtered segment

- isolate the noise and remove it from the frequency spectrum (like the old EQ method)

- use another part of the song that is sonically the same (i.e a repeating word or verse)

- take the same segment from the AUD recording, convert it to mono and remove the low end,

remix it back to stereo, then mix paste it back into the ALD. This isn't that bad actually,

and recreates the ALD fairly well.

- remove it. Last resort. This ends up sounding like a half-dropout, and not too bad. Always

remember to fade your dropouts though, or they sound much worse...



In all, if you listen to UTEOTW, there are probably 2 or 3 places you can hear significant

issues that couldn't be resolved to 100% Not bad, considering the source.



In a few places, I removed heavy claps or screams from the audience recording as well. Easiest

way to do this is splice in a quieter part from elsewhere in the show.



In all, I'm pretty happy with it. WOWY, my favourite song, had issues as well, and I was quite

happy with what I was able to do with it. That's what convinced me to do the whole show...



If you like it, drop me a note on Yahoo's U2SHN group, or find me on the DC U2SHN share -

that's probably where you got it!



Most importantly, SHARE this great music! Hoarders suck!



cheers

Birdman (aka Brian)
Tech Notes ALL
Trades Allowed Yes
Ratings Sound: A-
Reference / Generation 0003309488
Owned by david · Last Updated May 23, 2023