Trey Anastasio Band 02-18-11 State Theater, Portland, ME Source Review

After a 6 week hiatus following the Holiday Run, Trey Anastasio is back on the road for an interesting acoustic/electric combo that has offered some interesting surprises and some great music taboot.  Not surprisingly, there are fewer sources for this show than for your typical Phish show, but where there are two or more sources available, I will be here to tell you which one I think sounds the best.  As always, a big thanks to the tapers who go to the effort to record these shows and get them out into our hands.

Source 1 (hereafter binaural source)
Source: Sound Professionals SP-BMC-12 (Croakie mount) -> custom battery box with -10db pad -> Zoom h4n line-in (to 24bit/48kHz wav)
Location: (FOB) center of lower orchestra section, at the rail
Transfer: SD Card -> Computer -> Mastered in Reaper (x64) EQ -> Dynamics -> Tracking -> 16/44.1 ->Trader's Little Helper to fix SBEs and encode to flac (level 8) -> foobar2000 to tag metadata

16 bit source

Source 2 (hereafter MK4 source)
Source: Schoeps mk4>kc5>cmc6>fostex fr-2le w/Oade HD Concert Mod@48-24>CF
Location: FOB Right of Center
Transfer: CF>Soundforge-editing/tracking>Wavelab-SRC44-16>Flac Frontend>flac

16 bit source

The binaural source, as the taper makes note of in his comments, has a ton of crowd noise.  The taper apparently made great effort to minimize this with software, but alas, there is still a lot there.  When I say a lot, I mean that you can hear entire conversations going on, not just the low rumble of the crowd.  Trey's acoustic sounds quite nice, with good response up and down the frequency spectrum, picking up the squeak of his fingers as he moves to different frets.  There isn't a ton of "shimmer" on the acoustic, which I generally like, but that could have been the result of the soundman's tastes or Trey's preamp rather than the mics.  At a couple of places there is a weird stereo effect (see early in the vocals of My Friend) which I can only assume comes from somebody actually bumping into the mics.  I have a set of binaurals myself that I have used for stealth taping and I know this is common if you move your head (I usually mount mine to the brim of a ballcap).  The bass is boomy, but lacks clear notes, in other words, lots of muddiness down low.  The crowd noise also carries over into the electric set.


The MK4 source doesn't have as nice levels as the binaural source, however there is noticeably less crowd noise.  The acoustic guitar is not as up front on this source, but neither are there any conversations going on.  Once the full band comes on, the main complaint is that the bass is just a bit low in the mix.  The notes are distinct, just not as thumping as on the binaural source.  Overall, neither source is perfect, however the distractions of the crowd noise in the binaurals give the nod to the MK4 source.


Happy Listening!