Hey All,
I purchased this set right off the infomercial at inflated rates. I think it was $45 per installment for 10 installments, so a total of $450, but I wanted the material so I said "*&#% it" and paid. I got a total of 20 discs, which was everything they sold. This included one that was all comedy.
There are enough great performances in here to make me happy. It is also a cultural time capsule because the set covers post-psychedelia like a somewhat biased rock history lesson. We get all that disco had to offer (check out Labelle doing Lady Marmalade - a curiosity in modern times) and through the punk era (which this show never embraced) into early New Wave. It is largely a record of "popular music" of the time, and fortunately for me there is a big enough dose of what is now called "classic rock" to satisfy my jones. And also enough guilty pleasure from my early adolescence that I might cringe about being associated with in print, but at the time it was my music world.
So I can actually recommend the set - well recorded and mixed for mono, but keep in mind that the delivery destination was the mono speaker of 1970s broadcast television, so this is this is to be expected. I do have a vague recollection of the competing "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert" being simulcast on local FM in stereo, so maybe if they do a set of those we can get stereo mixes. I do not recall this being true for Midnight Special.
If it was recorded in multitrack that would afford the opportunity to go back and remix, but I suspect that either the masters are long gone or they are selling enough in the current format to disuade them from the added expense. Too bad the music is not the most important thing, but that's the biz. In the end I am glad these surfaced in excellent quality at all.
Ken