The West Side 002: "Out of the Shadows"
Phil Collins
Entertainment Centre, Melbourne, Australia
April 13, 1985

Disc 1:

1. I Don't Care Anymore - 6.25
2. Only You Know and I Know - 6.04
3. I Cannot Believe It's True - 4.32
4. This Must Be Love - 5.50
5. Against All Odds - 3.40
6. Inside Out - 5.21
7. Who Said I Would - 4.59
8. You Know What I Mean - 4.45
9. If Leaving Me Is Easy - 8.29
10. Sussudio - 5.07
11. Behind the Lines - 4.53
12. Don't Lose My Number - 4.31

Disc 2:

1. The West Side - 8.17
2. One More Night - 5.46
3. In the Air Tonight - 7.05
4. Band Introductions - 9.49
5. Like China - 5.32
6. You Can't Hurry love - 3.02
7. It Don't Matter to Me - 4.25
8. Hand in Hand - 11.08
9. Take Me Home - 8.20
10. People Get Ready - 3.31
11. It's Alright - 2.28

Total: 133.59


THE RECORDING

The source for this release was a fabulous soundboard, which unlike usually is the case with soundboards did have a full mix including a lot of bass frequencies :)
The soundboard is in glorious stereo, with lots of things going on in the separate channels.

The usual version of this show does have a lot of clicks. For this release however we used Alessandro Vasserot's version of the recording. He spent a lot of time removing those clicks.


NOTES ON THE REMASTERING PROCESS:

After a 32-bit conversion, noise reduction was used first. There was especially noise in the very low frequencies around 180Hz, which sounds like a sort of soft rumbling buzzing sound. This is one of the most annyoing noise-sounds, so I used a little more noise reduction on those frequencies than on the others. Also I did a little more reduction at 6kHz and higher. Overall, I kept the noise reduction at a real minimum though, since you'll also destroy part of the music. Later on, you're able to remove some more noise anyway with other techniques. This was just to get the most annoying aspects of the noise less obvious.

Next was multiband-compression. I tried to get some frequencies a bit more up in the mix, especially the higher frequencies, which were a bit buried. Meanwhile, for each frequency band, I messed with the stereo image, to expand the image and distinguish the instruments a lot more.

Then I did equalization to balance the frequency spectrum. Especially the highs were raised.

Now came one of the most difficult parts: listening through the whole thing and watching out for errors. And there were a LOT! Because of the multiband-compression and the better audible higher frequencies, in the quiet parts slight crackles had become more obvious. To give an example: during If Leaving Me Is Easy I found about 50 slight crackles! I was able to remove only about half of them, since some where so buried in there that I could not find a way to locate them and remove them. But the annoying ones are gone now.
Also a couple of channel drop-outs were corrected. There were some jumps in volume in the audience noise inbetween the songs. This was corrected were possible, and in other cases reduced.
At the end of If Leaving Me is Easy there was a few seconds of silence, this was removed.

For the first disc, I raised the volume on the right channel 0.7 dB to get them equal. For the second disc, it was 0.2 dB for the right channel.

I then used a very slight expander to give the mix just a little breathing in the very loud parts.

In the quiet parts where Phil spoke inbetween the songs, I used a compressor to make some words which he spoke very softly more audible.

Just a tiny bit of reverb was put over the complete recording to give some spaciality.

After that, the subharmonics were removed.

Hard limiting was used to destroy a few peaks which were too loud. Then the maximum volume was brought up to -.1 dB to get the maximum out of the sound. Then fade-ins and fade-outs were apllied.

The very last step was converting back to 16-bit format, with the use of dithering. The recording was then cut up in tracks, alligned on CD sector boundaries.