Siccome la registrazione è stata "tirata a lucido" (come è solito dire lui) da Paolo in persona, condivido qui le sue precise ed interessanti note tecniche, a commento del lavoro svolto:
Yes, believe it or not, this is a microphone recording done from the audience. A beautiful one. It only suffered from a very annoying hiss in all its quiet parts, something that would spoil the listening experience distracting the listener from what is really important here: music and performance.
It was probably due to the fact that the band, live, performs with a huge dynamic range, that makes the loud parts of the show VERY LOUD, and the quiet ones exceptionally quiet.
This is beautiful in a live environment, but very critical recording wise when you listen back to it, it asks for containment of the very loud peaks and a more intelligible (hence louder) very quiet passages, for a smoother fruition of the recording itself.
If containment of the louder peaks is a common and easy task, bringing more upfront the quieter passages is a totally different and problematic beast, in fact, since every element in the audio chain (microphone, pre-amplifier, and digital audio converters) introduces its own noise, virtually inaudible today, providing that output levels remain untouched, raising the levels of those quiter passages also means raising that noise not only introduced by the audio recording chain, but also the one generated by the P.A. in the venue.
The human listening system (ears + brain) reacts very differently when listening to music generated live by real musician and their instruments, and listening to a reproduction of them coming from a recording through a stereo equipment, that is why we feel the urge to change the original dynamic content to make the recording "sweeter".
Thankfully, de-noising software comes to our aid making it possible to raise those levels without annoying our ears with unwanted hiss noise, though here, it had to be applied after the modification already introduced by the original taper which, most probably, knows very little about mastering techniques.
So, here we are now with this beautiful (and now clean) recording, of the current King Crimson incarnation, ready to be enjoyed at its best by everyone, Happy 2022, Paolo Siconolfi
P.S. - At the beginning and end of each set the spoken parts have a strange sound behavior (the sound coming from the hall is extremely muffled). Knowing that, most probably, these parts happened (as usual for Robert Fripp) in full lights, the taper possibly hid the microphone in order to escape being caught by the security. Every ounce of power processing has been poured into preserving the voices coming from the P.A., even though this may have affected the sound of the crowd in the venue.
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