Gatemouth Brown
June 20, 1998
Shoreline Amphitheater
Mountain View, California, USA
"New Orleans By The Bay"

From digital audience master - Sony NT-2 digital micro recorder - see below for more about the format. Very good to excellent audience sound quality though a little bit of sound bleed from another stage can be heard during a few quiet spots between songs. (This was a festival with 4 or 5 different stages).

01 [7:08] Stop Time
02 [5:41] Bits and Pieces
03 [8:10] River of Invitation
04 [4:40] Take Me Back Baby
05 [4:34] Take The A Train
06 [5:04] Gate's Blues Waltz
07 [4:47] Caledonia
08 [5:35] One O'Clock Jump
09 [3:55] Midnight Hour
10 [4:49] Flying Home
total: 54:23

Lineage: 2 Nakamichi cm300 capsules (mounted in shoulders of a shirt) > "home made" mic. pre-amp > Sony NT-2 master.

Transfer (2008): Sony NT-2 > Sony NT Station NTU-S1 I/O dock (analog line outputs) > Macintosh with Audiomedia III soundcard > Pro Tools (minor "nip and tuck" edits, normalization and tracking) > AIFF > xACT (flac level 8 files with sector boundaries verified).

More about the recording format (unnecessary info for most downloaders but I already had it from a previous NT seed): This Sony format used tapes less than one tenth the size of a Dat tape. It worked fairly well but the tiny tapes were problematic and the audio signal was rolled off at 15k like a traditional audio cassette signal would be. But then like audio cassettes, it was not really originally designed for music. And the perceptive sound quality was excellent - similar but less compressed than the minidisc format which would follow it. Sony briefly made an I/O unit that the deck snapped into that had much better output preamps than what was built into the deck itself and added digital optical outputs too.

The biggest problems were that the tapes (available in 60, 90 or 120 minutes lengths) were usually over ten dollars each, and the very expensive recorder was hardly exported from Japan and never caught on enough for Sony's service department to learn how to keep them running problem free.

From a 1997 post from the Datheads listserver: The Sony "Micro-DAT" or "Scoopman" is more correctly known by the Sony designation NT-1 and NT-2. The NT-1 is an old mechanical model which hasn't been available for a while. The NT-2 uses all electronic controls to offer auto-reverse (the NT system records the tape in both directions) with a memory buffer to prevent any interruption of recording while the tape flips. This system uses no capstan/pinch roller system. The "NT" stands for Non-Tracking, as the tape is driven at a constant speed past the scanner heads at a fixed record speed. On playback, the head scanner is sped up 2x and the cpu removes the duplicated and unwanted data to spit out audio.

Specifications from a Japanese reseller:

· RECORDING SYSTEM Rotary-Head Helical-Scanning Digital Recording System
· NUMBER OF HEADS Four (4)
· TAPE SPEED 6.35mm/sec (approx.)
· NUMBER OF CHANNELS 2-Channel Stereo
· SAMPLING FREQUENCY 32kHz
· PLAYBACK FREQUENCY RANGE 10 - 14,500Hz
· PLAYBACK DYNAMIC RANGE Better than 80dB
· TOTAL HARMONIC DISTORTION less than 0.08%
· WOW & FLUTTER Below measurable limit · INPUTS Mic (Stereo mini jack/Plug-in power) Line (Stereo mini jack)
· OUTPUTS Headphones (Stereo mini jack) Line (Stereo mini jack)
· POWER SOURCE "AA" Dry Cell Battery + 1 (optional) AC Power Adaptor (supplied)

OK, that's the "lineage"!

Enjoy and SHARE!