**Remastered** by thir13en


Billy Corgan
2005-07-05
Vic Theatre
Chicago, IL


Tony over at Westernave recorded this on his MD the night of the broadcast. AOL billed it as a "CD Quality" stream (more on that later).

During the first minutes of the show, the MD crashed. I'm sure there was a breif moment contemplating the tossing of the MD out the window. But he courageously set it off on recording the rest of the show anyways.

This past spring, we were paired together by a mutal friend, and he sent me what he had to see what I could do to fix the situation. The show cuts out early into "A100", and comes back later into "I'm Ready". I don't recall the hard facts, but there was about 5-6 minutes that needed repair. So I took the mono-FM that circulates to fix those missing minutes, matched the EQ's and gave it some "fake" stereo enabling a decently smooth couple of transition points. I would also do my "thing" and work the audio over good. In the end it worked out rather well, and now we get the 90% plus of the show in true stereo form.

But there is a catch, as mentioned above about AOL's quality claim. We all know how much we can trust AOL, right? Yea, not at all. The scope is decent in integrity and the MD was set to no-compression, so it captured a good range of the stream and made for a very good source of what they offered. It's close to CD quality but still maintains some "stream" quality to it as well as there is an odd-shiftyness to certain parts, and a predictable FM-like compression exists. 

Honestly though, it's hard to tell what was what in some of the balance-bouncing areas. I can tell that there were a lot of stereo effects being used on the instrumentation, something that is completely lost in the mono-FM, but it definitely was screwing with something in the signal chain of this broadcast as well. 

I'd love a real stereo FM source, but mono I cannot deal with, too many questions with mono: What am I getting, the left or the right? If both, were they balanced when combined? Is it phased and half the instrumentation is cancelled out? The query is possibly endless and the correct answers are nearly impossible to acheive.

So, all that said, this show-this source-this remaster was a very close runner-up in my Top 10 list. I've listened to it many many times since I did this in April. I think I listened to the mono-FM-RM once. That says it all.


NOTE: This is my edit of the exact same show that was seeded here in the spring. The audio is unchanged, but the notable edits are: No DJ's, No station ID's, No banter...just the music baby!

Enjoy.



01-A100 
02-I'm Ready 
03-Mina Loy (M.O.H.) 
04-To Love Somebody
05-Now (And Then) 
06-Johanna
07-DIA 
08-Pretty, pretty STAR 
09-Walking Shade 
10-Sittin' On Top Of The World
11-Camera Eye 
12-All Things Change 
13-Bit 5 
14-I'm A King Bee
15-It's A Long Way To The Top


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SOURCE INFO


AOL CD-Stream>MD>WAV>VEGAS>13'd>FLAC