24.04.1987
USA, Daly City, Cow Palace
Cow Palace '87 First Night
exc. Audience

Disc 1: [51:57]
01. Where The Streets Have No Name [6:15]
02. I Will Follow [3:57]
03. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For [5:02]
04. MLK [2:28]
05. The Unforgettable Fire [4:31]
06. Bullet The Blue Sky [5:04]
07. Running To Stand Still [4:45]
08. A Sort Of Homecoming [5:51]
09. Sunday Bloody Sunday [6:01]
10. Exit [4:56]
11. In God's Country [3:02]

Disc 2: [40:53]
01. Bad [10:20]
02. October [2:09]
03. New Year's Day [4:56]
04. Pride (In The Name Of Love) [5:25]
05. With Or Without You [6:09]
06. Gloria [4:33]
07. 40 [7:18]

JEMS Master
24/96 Audio DVD

Gear: Teac M-100 mic (same as Nakamichi 300) > Sony Walkman D6-C

Transfer: 
Maxell UD-XLII master cassette > Nakamichi 670ZX azimuth-adjusted transfer (February 2008) > Nakamichi NR-200 external Dolby noise reduction processor > Wavelab 24/96 capture > Audio DVD Creator > LPlex (ripping, log included) > CoolEdit Pro 2 (downsampling to 16/44.1 > TLH > FLAC6

Notes:
Special shows deserve special releases. 

Over the years we've had many requests to transfer and torrent our Cow Palace '87 masters. These shows are among the best U2 shows I ever saw and I'm not sure the 25th was ever topped. Our ol' pal Mark Persic  was also there and his tapes are excellent. Ours are too. 

The first night was recorded about halfway up and halfway back on the side; the second night from behind the stage.

INDULGENCE ALERT: The most amazing thing about these two shows for the JEMS crew is that we had driven down 700 miles from Tacoma without tickets in hand for either night. In fact between us and our friends in San Fran who were letting us crash, we needed 12 tickets between the two nights and we had NOTHING.

Back in the day, tickets to the toughest shows were handled (at least for Bill Graham Presents shows in the Bay Area) by what for my money remains the most fair and equitable system possible: mail order. Tens of thousands sent in money orders and self addressed stamped envelopes, a few thousand were selected at random and received tickets in their SASE; the rest of us just got our money orders back. 

We struck out on the lottery but remained undaunted. Upon arrival in San Francisco (and after eating a North Beach Pizza) we heard from a local friend that he had received a phone message from a kindly sounding "Mrs. Watson" at the Cow Palace box office who was calling local residents that had missed out on tickets via the mail-order lottery and offering seats that had become available once the stage was put in place.

Armed with that vital information, we drove down to the Cow Palace box office and told the girl working that we had received an answering machine message about tickets being held for us after missing out on the lottery. She looked and looked on the list, but could not see our name, but when we mentioned that it was a "Mrs. Wilson" who had left the message, she looked up from the list and said, "how many tickets do you need?" Unbelievably, we worked the trick at least three times and wound up with tickets for all of us, both nights. END OF INDULGANCE

This show has been listed as being recorded with a Nakamichi 300 microphone; you'll see above that it was actually a Teac mic, which were manufactured by Nak but sold by Teac. Same mic, different name.

We've always considered these tapes to be among our best U2 masters and while we traded them way back in the day on cassette, in the digital era, the first DAT transfers we ever made were at 32khz. A few years ago we did do a proper DAT transfer at 44.1  but that hasn't appeared to circulate very wildly since I've seen the 32khz version on lists.

When we started planning to transfer the masters anew a few months ago we figured it might be wise to do a 24/96 capture to preserve this for future uses and to get the most out of the masters while they are still playing back without issues. Burning to DVD Audio would preserve the 24/96 fidelity for playback, but for those of you who know about DVD Audio, the quality is amazing, but the problem is that you need a DVD player that is specially enabled to play the DVD Audio format and many players aren't.

We had long-looked for a solution that would allow us to burn a high-resolution 24/96 DVD that could play back in any DVD player. That's when we stumbled across a cool little program that does just that: Audio DVD Creator.

With this program you can author a gapless, 24/96 audio disc playable in any DVD player, a true high-fidelity disc that holds nearly four times the digital information as a standard CD. You can't hear these masters in any better quality than this. 

And as it yields a standard Video_TS file, it burns just like a regular DVD. The one small concession is that while you can skip track to track, the authored disc CANNOT be fast-forwarded or rewound. Don't know why. But it seems a small concession.

I'm sure some of you will want us to do a standard audio version, at 44.1 and ready for CD burning. And at some point we will so please don't post asking for it.. But we thought these shows and recordings deserved the higher quality presentation and the format might encourage you to listen on a real stereo, not just your computer.

AGAIN, JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: THIS IS A 24/96 AUDIO ONLY DVD AND YOU CAN BURN IT AND PLAY IT JUST LIKE ANY OTHER NORMAL DVD YOU DOWNLOAD FROM HERE. 

For now, enjoy Night One.

Butterking for JEMS

CT's notes - I've included the original info for the excellent audio DVD of the gig, only updating the lineage to include the conversion from audio DVD to standard .wav, and then FLAC.  

U2Torrents: Torrent 7184 (by CTU2fan)