Yes

Ludwigshafen, Friedrich-Ebert-Halle, April 14th, 1974

Volume 21, Episode 138 from the HB (Heribert Baro) Series

Some background information first:
A while ago I visited my old friend HB in Mannheim who had recorded around 200 concerts in the Mannheim/Frankfurt area from 1970 until about 1977. He used a portable RtR mono tape recorder with a single external mono microphone but copied his masters onto 18cm reels when back at home after the shows, as tapes were expensive at the time and archiving this way was cheaper than keeping the master tape of every show. Speaking to several tapers of the time, this must have been fairly common practise.
Compact Cassettes were considered cheap and unreliable at the time. Over the years he copied some of his back-up masters onto cassette tapes as the quality of these had improved dramatically by the late seventies and they were easier to handle. Later on copies of the reels were also made with a DAT recorder, but I'm not sure on the whereabouts of these. Fortunately HB was wise enough to keep his RtR back-up tapes.
The shows he recorded back then covered nearly all genres from Rock to Jazz, including Led Zeppelin, ELP, Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and even Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Blood, Sweat and Tears and many many more.
So when I arrived at his appartment in Mannheim on a Saturday lunchtime he had a huge cardboard box of reels on the floor of his living room and he gave me the whole lot for a fresh digital transfer.

HB's back-up master tape (reel to reel), Reel 21, Concert #138

Digital Transfer made by me, CTDavies

Original Recording Equipment: mobile RtR recorder, most probably a Telefunken 300TS halftrack mono , maybe with the single external microphone TD33 with balance input control.
Source Master Tape: Unknown, probably 13cm BASF or Shamrock RtR (wiped when re-used later)
Original back-up Tape: 15cm AGFA RtR 1/4 Track mono
Playback Tape Deck: Revox A77 (revised) on 1/4 track mono, 9.5cm per minute
Digital Recorder: Sound Devices MixPre 3
Manual azimuth alignment (with mono headphone output setting on the MixPre 3 - which in most cases enables pinpoint accuracy)
Audacity: edited, normalised and de-noised
iZotope RX9: EQ plus Brainworx bx Stereomaker plug in

This is the tape that started it all. I think it was Rolf Ossenberg who told me in the early eighties that it was Heribert Baro who recorded this show. So I contacted him and he was willing to make a copy of his recording onto Maxell XL-II cassettes. There, however, were a disappointment as my copy had signs of dirtied up tape heads and a general impression of a coppy done quickly without much attention to detail.
Fast forward 40 years. I had a shitty week at work and was sitting at the kitchen table with my old address book from the eighties when I decided to call his old phone number from back then, not excpecting him to answer. But he did. I was caught completely off guard and didn't even know at first what to say.
For the rest of the story jump back to the background information and how I got to get his collection of back-up master tape reels.

The deal is Heribert gets copies of my transfers on CD as he doesn't do the internet and doesn't even have a mobile phone. So this transfer has been formatted to fit onto two cds, which fortunately matches the original with the tape flip.

01-01 Firebird Suite
01-02 Siberian Khatru
01-03 And You And I
01-04 Close to the Edge
01-05 The Revealing Science of God (cut)
- tape flip -
02-01 (cut) The Revealing Science of God
02-02 The Ancient
02-03 The Ritual
02-04 Roundabout
02-05 Starship Trooper


All in all, a nice piece of music history. Maybe not as good as my other HB uploads, but I'll rate this as a solid VG+.

Feel free to share on other sites, but please leave it as it is, don't remaster and/or change anything (not that it's worth it anyway). Please do not share on Dimeadozen!!

Enjoy :-) Chris