The Cure 1981-11-25 Lyceum Sheffield, Eng.fred21

The Cure 1981-11-25 Lyceum Sheffield, Eng.

The Cure, 1981-11-25, Lyceum, Sheffield
ref http://www.cure-concerts.de/concerts/1981-11-25.php

***Original version + version restored by ED*** (preradio@dimeadozen, preradio@PPTT).
Original version got by trade from 'Oliv2211' (PPTT pseudo).

Playlist for both versions:

01 The Drowning Man
02 Splintered in her Head
03 In your House
04 The Funeral Party
05 The Holy Hour
06 Primary
07 Charlotte Sometimes
08 Other Voices
09 All Cats are Grey (cut)
10 At Night
11 The Hanging Garden
12 M
13 Play for Today
14 A Forest
15 Forever
16 The Figurehead

- Original version info.
To my knowledge, this show hasn't been made available by torrent yet. I seed it here with courtesy of Oliv2211, who traded it with me a year ago. The original recorder seems to be unknown. Sound ranges to fairly bad to disastrous, pitch is half a tone too high, but it's good show, quite intense.

- Restored version info.
The 'Eight Appearances' tour being my favorite tour from the Cure, I decided to restore the first show of the tour after having restored the last one (see torrent#269035 on Dime). This proved a difficult task! The Figurehead is so bad it's beyond recovery. The other tracks were not in a good state either. Very high background noise, variable L/R phase imbalances, variable L/R level imbalances, and most annoyingly, quite a lot of wow and flutter, against which it's very hard to do anything.

In any case, after a lot of work, I managed to get a version I could enjoy listening to. Keep in mind that given even more time, a better restoration is naturally possible, and that a few aesthetic options during the restoration are questionable, such as low-frequency dynamic compression for instance. However, the goal here is not to get a definitive version, which would be possible but would take one month to get! but something you can enjoy listening to.

As usual, restoration techniques include spectral matching, L/R delta I corrections, L/R delta T corrections, denoting, master EQing, and this time, given the original recording's bad state, selective frequency compression. Everything was made inside Pro Tools, using the following plug-ins: Elemental Audio Firium, Digidesign EQIII, Waves L2, Waves XNoise, Waves ZNoise, SPL Vitalizer, Digidesign PitchShift. A screen capture for the restoration session can be seen at http://private.1-1-1-1.net/boot/1981-25-11/capture.png. For those interested in restoring, see http://1-1-1-1.net/pages/boot/boot.html for a bit more info.


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