Robert Plant & Jimmy Page @ Mansfield, MA 1998-07-14 (ALD)

 
LIMITED TIME / LAST TIME


https://pixeldrain.com/u/cuF2QcbS

Page And Plant
Great Woods Center For The Performing Arts
Mansfield, Massachusetts
July 14th, 1998

ALD Recording
Fixed phase cancellation and fixed glitches/skips by source mixing

Primary Source (caddy72): see notes below
Secondary Source (ademotte): ALD => Unknown => Trade DAT => Stand-alone Pioneer CD burner => CDR => EAC => FLAC front end (level 8)
Additional lineage (ledwhofloyd): FLAC > TAudioconverter (combine tracks) > Audacity > FLAC > TLH > FLAC (level 8)

Setlist
01. Egyptian Introduction 
02. The Wanton Song
03. Bring It On Home
04. Heartbreaker
05. Ramble On
06. Walking Into Clarksdale
07. No Quarter
08. Shining In The Light
09. Going To California
10. Tangerine
11. Gallows Pole
12. Heart In Your Hand
13. Babe I'm Gonna Leave You
14. How Many More Times (incl. Season Of The Witch)
15. Most High
16. Whole Lotta Love
17. Thank You
18. Rock And Roll

Running Time: 114:53

Band Personnel:
Jimmy Page - guitar
Robert Plant - lead vocals
Charlie Jones - bass guitar
Michael Lee - drums
Phil Andrews - keyboards


Primary source originally shared by caddy72 on May 31, 2008
Secondary source originally shared by ademotte on March 5, 2009

caddy72 Notes (2008):
I downloaded this very nice Concert Soundboard Recording from different users on the hubs, but somewhere between the 
soundboard and the shn files somebody made a polarity fault, resulting in XL Wide stereo with a Hole in the Middle and No 
Bottom. And played through a Dolby Pro-Logic decoder allmost everything came from the rear speakers. Also a vectorscope 
said: 98% opposite phase. I corrected the mistake and converted the wavs to FLAC. Now it's "fit to Broadcast" by technical 
standards.


ademotte Notes (2009):
This is an excellent recording from the Page/Plant "Walking Into Clarksdale" tour.  
It's one of the earliest ALD recordings I know of, and certainly one of the best-sounding ALDs from the 1990s. Like most of 
these, it suffers from too much high-end and limited range, and it's either a weak stereo or mono recording. With that 
disclaimer, it sounds really good - the mix is solid with the band members very well-balanced, and Plant is in great voice. 
BIGLY and the HMMT medley are definite highlights, as usual.

There were a couple of small (3-4 second) drop-outs throughout the tape, but I think I edited all of them down. If I missed 
one, sorry about that.  

It's not quite as good as the New Orleans or Vegas soundboards recently torrented on DaD, but it's close - and better than 
most of the audience recordings around here lately. If you like this tour, you'll like this show.


ledwhofloyd (Ross) Notes (Dec. 2022):
There are tape cuts in the recording after Heart In Your Hand and Whole Lotta Love.

The versions of these recordings shared by caddy72 and ademotte are very similar but not identical - I suspect they come 
from different DATs, but from the same original ALD. Both transfers had some minor glitches. I decided to primarily feature
caddy72's version because I thought it might have been a slightly cleaner transfer, but I may have been mistaken because
an extensive analysis of it revealed quite a few sections with brief bits of missing audio...

The reason why ademotte originally said that this "suffers from too much high-end" is because the version they shared had
phase cancellation. Unbeknownst to ademotte in 2009, caddy72 had previously fixed the phase cancellation for a different 
version. As caddy72 explains, fixing that improves the quality substantially. Later, ademotte discovered caddy72's version 
and started reseeding that version instead. 

I lined up the two versions in Audacity to compare them. caddy72's had a few more seconds at the start. ademotte's version 
ran just slightly faster than caddy72's - both are the correct speed - the difference must have something to do with the 
imperfections of DAT. Usually ademotte's version would gradually get a few milliseconds ahead to ademotte's after a few 
minutes, but I noticed every so often there were jumps in the sync and caddy72's would somehow get ahead. It turned out 
that caddy72's was occasionally dropping/skipping small segements of audio. The skips were short enough that you had to 
listen carefully to pick up the issue, but it was definitely skipping on occasion.

I spent many hours slowly scanning through the two versions and whenever I identified a jump in their sync, I would find 
the skip in caddy72's version and patch up that section with the appropriate portion from the ademotte version - with the 
phase cancellation fixed by inverting the right channel. Because the two source versions are almost identical, I could do 
this essentially perfectly accurately down to the sample but it was a pretty tedious process.

I patched 19 different sections in total. I'm not 100% certain I got them all, but considering I was able to approximately
sync the two versions, I think I did find all them. I made most of the patches around 0.3 sec - 1 sec long - I could have
made them a little shorter but that was most convenient for me. This project would probably have been a lot easier if I
used the ademotte version as the primary source instead and fixed its problems, but like I said, I thought that caddy72's 
version might have been transferred slightly better. I suspect there might be other DAT sources of this recording out there 
somewhere, but after all these years, would those DAT tapes be playable without similar issues? I do not know. At least now 
there's this fixed version.