(Audience FLAC)
Lou Reed
Paramount Theater
Seattle, WA
May 3, 1992
JEMS Master
Recording Gear: Sonic Studios DSM-6 > Sony D8 DAT
JEMS Transfer: DAT master > Sony 75ES > Wavelab 5 capture 16/48 (part one) and 16/32 (part two) .wav > iZotope MBIT+ resample to 16/44.1 > iZotope RX 5 and Ozone 5 mastering > Pro Tools (Sound boost) > Audacity > FLAC > TLH
Vocals, Guitar – Lou Reed
Background Vocals – Jimmy Scott
Bass – Rob Wasserman
Drums – Michael Blair
Guitar – Mike Rathke
First Set
01 Intro
02 Dorita (The Spirit) >
03 What's Good (The Thesis)
04 Power and the Glory (The Situation)
05 Magician (Internally)
06 Sword of Damocles (Externally)
07 Goodbye Mass (In a Chapel Bodily Termination)
08 Cremation (Ashes To Ashes)
09 Dreamin' (Escape)
10 No Chance (Regret)
11 Warrior King (Revenge)
12 Harry's Circumcision (Reverie Gone Astray)
13 Gassed And Stoked (Loss)
14 Power and the Glory #2 (Magic Transformation)
15 Magic and Loss (The Summation)
Second Set
16 Smalltown
17 Nobody But You
18 Images
19 A Dream
20 Dirty Blvd.
21 Beginning of a Great Adventure
22 Rock ’n’ Roll
23 -Encore Break-
24 Sweet Jane
25 Band Introductions > Walk on the Wild Side (with Little Jimmy Scott)
26 Satellite of Love
In the wake of the passing of our partner Jared (the J in JEMS), the JEMS Archive has moved south, giving me the opportunity/burden of going through thousands of tapes as well as several hard drives onto which Jared put many tape transfers he made in the last five or so years. Here’s another one of the latter, capturing the late Lou Reed on the Magic and Loss tour.
There was something immediately appealing about this show as soon as I started to master Jared’s recording. It is musically rich and Lou himself seems more melodic than usual. It’s also a fine capture, recorded to DAT with Sonic Studios’ binaural “eyeglass” mics which were in vogue with JEMS at this time.
I’ve always liked the sound of the Sonic Studio mics overall, their downside being they are omnidirectional, tending to pick up a lot of audience noise, and can sound distant in a big room. On this night the crowd is respectful for the most part and the capture feels close enough to satisfy. Samples provided.
As was often the case in the early days of our DAT recordings, when the prices of blanks was still hovering around the $10 per tape, Jared ends up switching from 16/48 to 16/32 in the back half of the show to fit the complete performance on one 120m DAT. Per DIME rules, this is disclosed in the lineage as a composite of a 16/48 and 16/32 native recording, which I have resampled to 16/44. Quality wise you will not notice the difference aurally, though you will see the frequency cutoff if you look on a Spectrum Analyzer, and who among us doesn’t these days? ;0
We shared the recording with frogster who sent some additional insights on the performance:
"What a great show! The quality is superb! I expected the usual "JEMS quality" that many of us, the DIME members, are used to, but this is something stellar.
About the sound, while i said that this is something stellar (in fact, it is) it had its faults and there were a few things that needed to be corrected before this had to circulate. Mainly, everything was in its place, but the performance had very low volumes at some points (if you use VLC player, you'd hear these points if you had increased the volume to 200%).
I'm not a professional remasterer as much of the people are but i managed to remove some of them, while there were others i couldn't, so i shared this with fellow member acetboy, who helped me with these issues. His notes were:
"The original files had an RMS of -21.1 db and peeked at .8 db. Now it’s at -20.9 db RMS and it peeks at .2 db. About two and a half minutes into the original set 1 I could tell that the taper had boosted his recording volume. So bringing the first 2:30 minutes up to the volume that he boosted to, helped get the spoken part a bit louder. It took more than that though.
That spoken part at the beginning of the show that was so quiet is now almost 20 db louder than it was. Yet it all sounds totally natural, no sudden volume jumps that stick out.
I also boosted some talking one or two times later in the show also. The applause between songs is a bit more attenuated also. Once again sounding perfectly natural."
Now you can listen everything flow without these low volume points. I'll put some samples to show the before and the after. Thanks again to acetboy for the help in this show.
And if we talk about the performance, Lou seems really happy, making jokes between songs, introducing them and even explaining why he wrote them (like Harry's Circumcision).
About the music: if i were you, i wouldn't have any doubt about this. This is a solid performance, and if we take the fact that this concert (if we take away the time between songs and the encore break) was almost 3:30 hours of music, so i guess that makes you wonder: who performs for almost 4 hours these days?
I'm proud and happy this is circulating, as far i'm aware no recording of this date existed before now. A great performance, overall great sound, Magic and Loss is a great (and now classic) album, Lou knew the crowd was enjoying the concert and he made sure the money they paid was worth it."