As a life long Neil Diamond fan, in fact I can remember being rocked to sleep as a baby to the echo's of Hot August Night, I was so excited to find this DVD and the era the it represented, the Mid-70's when Neil Diamond was the essential Singer-Songwritter of his generation. Nobody had yet heard of Billy Joel, Elton John or Bruce Springsteen. When it came to male singer-songwritters, Neil was the man. The song selection and concert presentation on this DVD is first rate a nice mix of his early classics and just released songs from Johnathan Livingston Seagull and Beutiful Noise recordings with an appropiriate amount of crowd interaction. In the Mid-70's Diamond's voice was still strong and he was singing his music, not talking it like he has progressed towards in the mid-80's and later. My biggest disappointment with this video is the sound mixing. Realizing this video is over 30 years old and there are serious sound limitations in the source tape, but still it does not appear to have been any effort or attempt to clean up the sound. There is no 5:1 suround sound offered and in portions of the DVD the sound has a repetative "hissing" that is either an poor dual layering of the disc or a source tape defect. I found this sound defect to be very distracting from an otherwise historical DVD presentation. It is a shame, the producers did not spend a few more dollars to clean up and present the audio in the first class presentation that it deserved. If the music from Woodstock/Jimi Hendrix and early Rolling Stones can be made almost prestine, then there is no excuse for the defects in this DVD's audio. So for the concert, songs, presentation 5 stars, for the audio 1 star, overall 3 stars, but ohh what it COULD have been.
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