The first showing of the Soundstage special in Chicago was last night. Honestly - the music was sabotaged by a terrible video and audio performance. The video was hardly even recognizable as HD, the sound mix was awful, the editing was poor - and to top it off WTTW's (our PBS station) broadcast sucked too. Not only did WTTW do a lousy broadcast, they kept running a banner promoting the BW live date here in Chicago. The banner was on the screen FAR too much, and was a real distraction and annoyance.
The video quality was mostly crappy - not sharp, poor contrast, just generally low quality. I thought something was wrong with the video gear at my house, but other channels looked fine.
The audio - where do I start? The mix was disgusting, you could hardly hear any of the background vocals, the audio was VERY heavily compressed, the volume level varied up and down randomly it seemed. The few brief introductions that took place before some songs were inaudible - I could see Nate Ruess' lips moving, but the mix was so poor you couldn't hear what he was saying. At times the video and audio were out of sync. I would have to say that was the worst live concert audio I've heard in a very long time, maybe ever.
Just trying to write about it is so aggravating. I thought that Joe Thomas did a horrible job putting the show together - no continuity, choppy and too frequent cuts, no introductions of many of the people on stage (Special Guests?? It didn't seem so), and so on. No introduction of Ricky Fataar or Billy Hinsche, half-a**ed intro of Blondie, no mention of the band or Matt Jardine... It just seemed like a mad rush to get it over with. I think it was the worst Soundstage I've ever seen. Coupled with the ridiculous broadcast quality I almost turned it off after about 20 minutes.
Some of the musical performances were great - as best I could tell - some of it was not so hot. What's with the pounding drum in the God Only Knows performance by Zooey Deschanel? It sounded like a marching band drum - far too prominent, inappropriate, and I thought ruined an otherwise nice performance.
I hope the DVD is a lot better - between Joe and WTTW I doubt many people found much to like. I was SO looking forward to seeing the show - but I now wish I hadn't. Brian and his band and guests deserve MUCH better than they got!! How could anybody have looked at that mess and said it was okay to put on the air? I'm SO disappointed.
I hope the other broadcasts are better, although Joe's handiwork is unfixable.
Jim, I couldn't agree with you more about the quality of the show last night. I live about six blocks from WTTW and I'm a big fan of Soundstage. I was very shocked at what I saw. I will say this, they re-aired the show today at 2 and to me it sounded just like the audio on the Soundstage website. Last night I also thought that the introductions of the artists in between seemed disjointed. After watching it today, now that you can hear Brian actually announcing them, the show sounds much more fluent. I bet there was an error in the feed last night on WTTW. I wish I knew who to call there, or maybe I should show up at their front door. But I agree with HeyJude that each individual PBS station probably feeds their own show. I also would guess that PBS cuts the show up to fit their hour time slot. So far everything on the Soundstage website, which is probably not controlled by PBS, sounds great.
One other slight disagreement, the crawl on the bottom of the screen promoting tickets for Brian's concert was done about as tastefully as I've seen on PBS. They are usually constantly begging for money, and at least with Soundstage you don't have those ridiculous pledge breaks with 30 people in the background answering calls like the Jerry Lewis telethon. I checked my listing and it looks like the show airs again tonight. Maybe you should watch it and report back. It will be my third time, but I love Brian.
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