It's hard to kick the 'Yankee Stadium 1994' recording in the teeth with a bad review as it's a pretty good capture of an entire show - perhaps one of the better that I've seen from the 1994 tour in terms of completion. Unfortunately, this VOIO also suffers greatly from it's fair-to-poor sound quality and a truly rotten vantage point that doesn't enable you to see very much of the no-bigger-than-thumb-sized band members playing music a fucking quarter-mile away from the lens. In fact, so distant from the stage is our camera eye that the sound does not sync very well with the visuals - we actually hear the music a half second *after* we see it being played. Agh.

Overall, I'd rank 'Yankee Stadium' as a pretty fair performance as far as 1994 shows are concerned, though the 'Division Bell'-heavy first half of the set seems to drag onwards interminably (a common complaint during most of the non-'Dark Side Of The Moon' concerts). Shot from quite literally all the way across the famous venue at the very top of the upper deck (not far to the right of the rear quad speaker array), this recording ably covers all of the visual highlights of the evening. Apparently, the cameraman had seen this show before and therefore had a pretty good idea where to be looking when something happened, which results in very little of the show being missed -- a truly welcome break from the jarringly fast "what the fuck" pans common to many of these tapes. Having said that, I must add that there *is* a tendency on the part of the cameraman to drift off to the right of the stage for whatever reason and not correct his viewing angle until something is about to happen. Even better, he becomes bored enough with the show during "Keep Talking" to briefly zoom in on the traffic passing by on the orange-lit byways outside of the stadium, heh heh. I must also note here that this guy is unfortunately not immune to the annoying "let's zoom ALL THE WAY IN on the source of that laser/light effect" school of concert recording. D'oh!.

FAR more aggravating than any zoom miscues, however, is the sound quality of this recording, which is by some measure the worst of any 1994 VOIO I have ever investigated. Perhaps the distance involved is the main culprit here -- the quad channels seem to come through relatively clearly, but the audio from the main speaker towers is thuddy, indistinct, and thick. Hell, from a sonic standpoint, 'Yankee Stadium 1994' is more comparable to an audience recording of the band's 1970-71 shows then a show recorded only eight years ago.

At least in terms of visuals, the news is generally good as we are able to zoom in surprisingly well for being so far away from the action. The colors and lasers turn up pretty well, as do the films (with only a small pause for re-focusing, we are able to take in a full-screen view of them as they are running). It's also possible to at least pick out who is who onstage, though the band's faces remain completely invisible -- "it's so hard to distinguish them," says an unseen woman sitting nearby (and this was *without* the benefit of a telephoto lens to look through). We are also able to take in the *full* light show and production ... but not quite in the way the band originally intended, I'm afraid. Thanks to the nosebleed-altitude seats occupied by the cameraman, our view of the band on stage is frequently interfered with by the normally-invisible row of VariLites set low behind the stage that wind up shining directly into the camera lens through just about every song played during the show, creating a hell of a lot of unwanted glare and frequently reducing some of the figures on stage to wispy shadows.

Judging from the constrained viewing window that prohibits wide shots of the venue itself (when the camera is zoomed all the way out, it looks like we are watching the show on our own Mr. Screen), it appears that the guy shooting this concert had some kind of tube wrapped around his camera lens to avoid detection by stadium security. Luckily, as long as his camera stays zoomed in to a reasonable degree (which it does most of the show), the constrained viewing area is almost entirely unnoticeable. Despite this, it's still a tad frustrating that when we are finally afforded a superior view of the whole stadium just after "Comfortably Numb" (after the cameraman messes with the lens attachment for a moment) we realize just how much of the show we have missed - suddenly, we are looking at the entire bowl of Yankee Stadium instead of just the area immediately surrounding the stage. It's a pretty incredible long view -- too bad that we have to wait until this late point in the proceedings to realize just how freakin' BIG show this really was.

A quick aside while we're on this subject: while I can't blame the cameraman for using some preventative caution in filming this event, it appears that his worries were unfounded anyway -- judging by the guy we clearly see selling unofficial tee-shirts before the show even starts, it appears that the upper decks weren't very well patrolled this time around (this lack of event staff in the upper decks may have been endemic on this tour, as my experience at the Pontiac Silverdome 'Dark Side Of The Moon' show can attest, but I'll save that story for another time).

Perhaps if our cameraman had been seated a few rows lower, he could have solved the glare problem. Maybe the terrible sound quality here could have been averted with a better microphone or camera unit. What-ifs and coulda-beens aside, I'm only able to recommend 'Yankee Stadium 1994' to completists who prefer sheer quantity over quality. Everyone else should either proceed straight on to 'Pulse' or check out the Oakland and San Diego titles reviewed earlier.