Saturday Night In San Francisco - Plak

Instead of using the original master, they went back to the analog 16-track recordings of the actual concerts. These were also not in great condition, but could be processed at Skywalker Sound in Marine County, California. Then the task was to generate a mix from the two concerts with even more perfect bars and Katsu Naito & Roy Hendrickson were hired for this. The former had already done the cuts for Friday Night and still knew exactly what he had paid attention to more than 40 years ago. Al Di Meola was again the driving force behind this. The perfectionist simply doesn't like mistakes, whereas John McLaughlin sees this more as part of the live atmosphere.

The new mix came to Bernie Grundman, who produced two different lacquer cuts. One with transistor technology on the cutting system and one with tube technology. Since the decision had already been made to go the purely analog route for the Impex production, it is hardly surprising that the tube version was chosen for the 'right' sound.
At Al di Meola's request, the LP cover had to be purple and a metallic lacquer was used, as well as an elaborate manual.

It was pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI in Los Angeles. A side note: Only the IMPEX version of this release was produced purely analogue and was mastered without intermediate digitization. They insisted on absolute quality and therefore cut with a lot of dynamics. The second side of the LP therefore only contains two tracks, while others were prepared to limit the dynamics to accommodate three.