Led Zeppelin 1971-09-28 Festival Hall, Osaka, Japan

Led Zeppelin
Festival Hall,
Osaka, Japan
September 28, 1971

Soundboard Recording - Remastered by Led Zeppelin Rarities

Source Files - Please Please Me (EVSD 1258-1259)
Remastering software and lineage unknown, but refer to the notes for a description of the methodology
Additional lineage: 32-bit/44.1kHz WAV > 16-bit conversion in Adobe Audition 3.0 > WAV > Trader's Little Helper 2.7.0 > FLAC

Setlist
01. Heartbreaker (cuts in)
02. Since I've Been Loving You
03. Black Dog
04. Dazed And Confused
05. Stairway To Heaven
06. Please Please Me
07. From Me To You
08. Celebration Day
09. Bron-Y-Aur Stomp
10. That's The Way
11. Going To California
12. We Shall Overcome
13. Tangerine
14. Down By The Riverside
15. The Grand Ole Opry
16. What Is and What Should Never Be
17. Moby Dick

Band Personnel:
Jimmy Page: guitars
Robert Plant: vocals
John Paul Jones: bass guitar, keyboards
John Bonham: drums


Remastering Notes (from Led Zeppelin Rarities):
Here's the new Empress Valley soundboard release, filling in another major gap in the band's
esteemed Japanese tour of 1971. I like this one because the band plays a lot of little improvised
stuff that really adds to the concert. This release is missing The Immigrant Song and half of
Heartbreaker at the beginning, as well as Whole Lotta Love at the end, and the entire encore.
As unfortunate as that is, it's good that EVSD was able to put out a majority of a concert this
time. Also, this isn't one of my more inspired thumbnail designs, but major shoutout to the
Empress Valley graphics designer for using royalty-free fonts HAHA.

This one was a bit of a mess to put together, as the raw recording was frankly in bad shape for a
new release.

In short, there was a major phasing issue caused by the left and right channels not being properly
properly in-time. If you listened to it in mono, it would sound like it was coming from underwater.

After I solved that, the next problem I encountered was that the stereo balance was so far out of
whack, that the whole thing sounded like it was hard-panned to the left, when in fact both channels
were the same volume. The reason for this was that the high frequencies on the left side extended
much higher (about 2 kHz) than those of the right side, really making the left shine a lot brighter.
After a good amount of experimenting, my solution to this was completely eliminating the right
channel, and placing the left channel in the center, and rebuilding the entire stereo width from
there. I put a nice fat reverb on the whole thing which really helped widen the recording back to
something stereo, and made it sound much more alive.

The last major problem I had with this, and I'm looking at you EVSD, was the really bad noise
reduction on the whole thing. Noise reduction is used to take any sort of humming or hissing out
of a recording, without seriously affecting the stuff you want to keep. I usually stay away from
this, as it does more harm than good. There's really no way to digitally remove something from an
old, analogue tape, without leaving nasty-sounding digital leftovers from that process. If you
listen closely in the quiet moments on this bootleg, you might hear robotic chirping or sparkling
noises, or really quiet instrumentation get muffled in a very crude way. This is because Empress
Valley went way overboard with the noise removal on this entire bootleg. While it's not a deal-
breaker, I personally would've much preferred whatever hiss was on this old tape. The reverb helps
mask this though.

All in all, the mastering process was enough that I can safely call this my own remaster. Oh well.
I'm personally kinda proud of how much I was able to improve the sound on this one. I've been
taking upper-level audio classes at school for the last year or so, and I think it really shows in
my more recent videos.

Link