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 Post subject: Van Halen: Live Without a Net (1986) [08WL-38129]
PostPosted: 28 Oct 2020, 22:59 
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Van Halen: Live Without a Net (1986) [08WL-38129]

Last night, as I was writing this load of old drivel, I was paid a visit by Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan. He told me if I didn't import a Van Halen Laserdisc soon he'd melt my brain. Tired, I went upstairs to bed. At about 3am there was a tap on my window. I turned it on and had a drink. I thought about what Darth Vader had said some more, so I hopped on to YAJ, found a juicy first pressing of Van Halen: Live Without A Net, booked it, packed it and fecked off back to bed. I found some sleeping pills on my bedside cabinet. I woke one of them up and took it. The lamp went out, I told it to be back by morning and went to sleep.

Weeks later...

I bloody love Van Halen. What a band.

Personally their album of Glenn Miller covers, Pennyslvania 5150, is not my actual favourite in their lavish discography. Live Without A Net is indeed a tour of the 5150 material. It's not that I don't like it. Far from it. It's just that for me I prefer the brilliance of Van Halen II. That is without a doubt my absolute favourite Van Halen album. I wish they'd done a Laserdisc of that, but alas Halen LD's are few, and not exactly varied.

So what we have here is a live recording of one of their Connecticut concerts on either August 26th or 27th of 1986 (dates clarified at a Van Halen tour schedule supersite). You get a typical high energy concert here (Van Halen fans should have an idea of what to expect). Lots of mean, wangling guitar riffs, shredding, insane basslines, mesmerising keyboard fingerwork and so on.

There's nothing wrong with the concert as such. The lads come on, it's very high tempo, they play their instruments to within an inch of their lives, prank each other, perform different solo's (drums, guitar, bass etc) and sprinkle in some great crowd interaction. Climbing the stage scaffolding, reaching out to fans, drinking shots, swinging instruments around etc etc.

Video is fairly good minus the slight soft appearance and occasional fuzzy moment. The whole performance is fairly well put together as it goes. Nice edits of each song are presented in such a way that you can see everything that is going on both on and off stage. You don't feel like you are missing out on the action. This would be an even greater memento if you actually attended the concert too.

And the audio? Well, here's where the whole disc turns in to a turgid, soggy, poo-filled pair of pants. The kind of poo you could dip bread in to at that.

You get a choice of Analog or Digital, and that's great. But it's just all so muffled. Throughout the entire disc you've got a great selection of tracks that have serious potential to bring your sound system to it's knees, begging for mercy. Yet everything is crowded and squashed in tight across such a narrow centre band that it just sounds like every instrument is battling for prominence. In short it sounds like a mess.

There's occasional glimpses of potential when the odd drum beat comes pounding out of your speakers ahead of everything else. Yet it's literally that though, a literal beat or two of a drum that comes thudding through all of the muffled noise you wind up thinking it must be some sort of sound board fault. Perhaps my disc was on the turn?

I noticed that Live Without A Net has six different releases. Which makes me think it's either a very popular disc, or that there may have been faults with each revision until they got it right. Therefore I am not giving up on this disc. 08WL-38129 seems to be the most common edition with 45P6-9022 a close second.

The least common (afaik) is the WPLR-47 release from 1996. I've managed to purchase a copy of that today. When it arrives I can only hope it sounds better than this disc. What a wasted opportunity.

RIP Edward Van Halen.
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 Post subject: Re: Van Halen: Live Without a Net (1986) [08WL-38129]
PostPosted: 28 Oct 2020, 23:27 
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Great review style as usual, though a somewhat disappointing result. Going by your description audio quality on this LD comes across as being very similar to the Roxy Music High Road LD recorded about 3 years earlier, excellent concert but SQ was so poor I sold it on in the end. Thanks Ted, this is another one I shall probably avoid now :thumbup:
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 Post subject: Re: Van Halen: Live Without a Net (1986) [08WL-38129]
PostPosted: 28 Oct 2020, 23:46 
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Cheers. I had high hopes for it. I know my little setup isn't up to the lofty heights of others but it can still handle itself and this disc just didn't sound great at all. It felt really constricted, and that everything was just dumped in the middle with no clear separation of anything, just one big squabble for dominance.

Here's hoping the 1996 disc is better. If it turns out to be the same then I guess no decent version exists?
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