Customer Reviews

The Dark Side Of The Moon [VINYL]

This is my 3rd cd version of this album,also had the vinyl,way back in the day,couldnt help myself the carrot of the live disc sold me,so what do you need to know?

Disc 1 : is the original disc,remastered by James Guthrie again,his '94 remaster was perfect as far as i could tell and truth be told i cant really detect any noticeable difference,sometimes with these 'new' remasters i think you will convince yourself to hear something different.initially on first play i thought possibly a little clearer,the background voices slightly more audible,after a couple of listens with the headphones and comparing to the prev disc im not too sure.Whats not in dispute is this is a fantastic piece of music that has stood the test of time,beautifully arranged.played and recorded nearly 40 years ago,its hard to believe there will be a first time buyer,so i guess most will know already what their buying.

Disc 2 : now i've never heard any live 70's recordings of 'dark side...' so this was my principle reason for buying and its well worth it,clocking in at around 12 mins more than its studio counterpart there a couple of moments were the band add in a little extra,nothing too much to change the overall feeling and what a performance,all four members on fire and a sound quality that frankly stunned me,i thought a recording 37 years old may suffer but this is absolute quality and worth the purchase price alone.

The sound quality on the remaster is excellent so no worries there,the packaging ,well that a different story.the 2 discs are housed in a tri fold digi pak which the seams are already tearing,the housing for the discs quite tight,so beware when taking in/out,the booklet is very average,no improvement on the '94 remaster,just the lyrics and photos already available previously,all housed in a flimsy slipcase,if it wasnt such a superb musical release i would have been tempted to dock a star.

The rhetorical question of course is why not just release a live set from wembley '74? answers on a ten pound note to EMI.

Ultimately its the music that counts and this is a 10/10 on both cd's,a truly wonderful album with outstanding live bonus disc.

Fans of Pink Floyd know DSOTM like the back of their hand; they can recite the lyrics, hum the melodies and play air guitar like pros. The question is, can this SACD version make it sound any better? Put simply, yes it does....and then some.
Floyd's music has always lent itself to cutting edge audio technology and the 5.1 SACD mix is proof of this. Using an SACD player and a 5.1 system you get true surround sound. Now this means that the voices in "Speak to Me" swirl around the listener, clocks chime as if their in your room and coins jangle about you. But more than this, now that there are 5.1 channels of sound the music is clearer and better defined. It has more presence, placing the listener in the centre of the music. It provides a full audio experiance.
Yet it it incredibly subtle. Now instruments are intricately placed to enhance the listening experiance; there are no gimmicks here. In "Time" the rototoms sound as if they are in the centre of the room, as if they are directly in front of you. The sax in "Us and Them" comes solely from the centre speaker given it far more clarity than before (the sax used to get lost in the mix before, I felt). Subtle effects, yet hugely effective.
All in all such near studio-like quality in the sound (this depends on how good your system is) adds to the music, sharpens it, makes a thirty year old album seem new.
For any Floyd fan DSOTM is an essential purchase and this SACD is just as neccessary. Get it whilst you can...

For me, Dark Side of the Moon is not just about the music (which of course is amazing) but the whole package. Like The White Album and Quadrophenia, it's the extras which make owning these albums a real pleasure and give the sense that you have acquired a piece of art. With prices of mint condition original presses of DSOTM going for hundreds of pounds, this seemed like a good opportunity to get hold of a fresh print at a not unreasonable price (under twenty quid), particularly as my old vinyl edition (4th or 5th press I think) is a bit long in the tooth and the posters have long since disappeared. I also have the 30th anniversary CD which has kept me going on the iPod for the last few years.

Receiving this album through the door really did recreate that long-lost thrill of receiving a brand new vinyl LP. Compared to my old edition, the rainbow colours really stand out on the beautiful black sleeve. Inside, all the components of the original package are present and correct. The pyramid poster looks slightly more purple than my original which was more blue while some of the pictures on the group sleeve have been flipped to show that Dave and Roger are actually not left-handed guitarists, something that always bugged me about the original poster! In addition, there is a stunning new poster (by Storm Thorgerson?) which reproduces the sleeve design in swirly, psychedelic paints. A couple of clues on the sleeve tell you that this a new edition though. The sleeve was printed in the EU (rather than GB) while a sticker on the back refers to (takes a sharp intake of breath) a digital remaster. I know there will be lots of people who will take umbrage at this idea but the information on the sleeve that the album is also available in 8-track cartridge format may prove to be a red herring for analogue lovers.

So how does the all-important 180g slab of plastic sound on the wheel of steel? Pretty good actually. The vinyl itself is solid with little flex and there is no noticeable surface noise, clicks or pops. The album doesn't sound too different from previous vinyl and CD versions I've heard but the one thing I have found is that it is noticeably easier to track the bass line while some of the keyboard sounds seem to emerge more from the mix. All the special effects (especially the clocks) still sound amazing and I couldn't hear evidence of this being a digital transfer. I can't really give a more considered assessment than that though not having heard a 'holy grail' pressing on a top end system but in the end it's the music which counts. I leave others to quibble over the relative merits of all the different editions of this album but I am very happy with this purchase. The MP3 download code included with the album is a nice touch but does not include any of the extra material included in the expanded CD sets which is a shame. I would have at least liked the Empire Pool show without having to pay separately for it.

Dark Side of the Moon has been with us for 30 years; it has been performed live countless times, excerpts have been played on TV for decades. Could this SACD version surprise anyone? Yes...and then some.
You may need to be a Pink Floyd fan to like Dark Side but you cannot fault this new SACD version. James Guthrie, a long time engineer/producer with Pink Floyd seems to have done the impossible and essentially transformed Pink Floyd's opus. The way he has used 5.1 is incredible. There's no gimmicky use of front to rear panning hear, instead the speakers are used to enhance the music by making the music sound wider, and yet at the same time totally surrounding the listener.
The sound is cleaner and clearer than ever before, due to the multi-channel sound but also due to the SACD mix too. SACD is the closest sound to the original you will get.
From the very beginning and 'Speak to Me', the sound assaults you with its clarity. Typically 'On the Run' is an amazing audio experience, but even more standard songs such as 'Money' sound incredible (Gilmour's guitar solo's sound more 'vibrant').
'Us and Them' used to sound somehow distorted in stereo, but now you can ascertain every noteplayed and every word sung. You will hear things you've not heard before, or at least you'll hear them differently. Guthrie should be awarded for his excellent handling of this new SACD release. It's an essential purchase. Buy it!

There's not much to say that hasn't already been said about Dark Side. For what it's worth I can only try to explain my recent simultaneous discovery of Pink Floyd and their masterpiece. I've been into all sorts of music from hip hop, Prince & Nirvana to dance music, but I'd never really ventured into the realms of classic rock. I bought DSOTM on a whim one day, listened to it from strart to finish and was so blown away by it I listened to it again straight away. It's simply a superb musical experience, a journey even. The lyrics are simple but meaningful, David Gilmour's guitar playing is spectacular, and the whole album falters nowhere from the opening bar to the last fade. This really is a must own album for anybody who loves good music. Makes the vast majority of "verse/chorus/verse" popular compositions seem a complete waste of time.

Buy this album, make absolutely sure you buy it on vinyl, if you do not, you will have gone through life missing one of the greatest music experiences of all time!

Digital is NOT the same and does NOT do it justice!

I've just worked out that I've bought Dark Side of The Moon 4 times.

Once on Vinyl
Once Original CD
Once SACD 2003 (?)
And now this version.

The music is wonderful, the live album is wonderful but the thing that really lets this down is the cheap and nasty card cover.

I've only had this item a week and a half and the card cover is beginning to crease and become covered in finger marks even though I am a bit of a fuss about treating my cd's with care.

I just think considering the big loud fanfare this reissue series received it is an opportunity wasted.

Perhaps in 5 years they'll release it again in a proper hard wearing cover and I'll get the opportunity to buy it for the 5th time.

The immersion boxed set is a bit of a mixed bag to be honest.

Music wise it is 4/5. I deduct 1 star for not including the SACD version but it could be argued that anyone likely to be buying this set would already have the SACD(it is very disappointing that the Wish You Were Here set will not be including it, rather you would have to pay an extortionate amount to purchase from USA and not previously available so doesn't even have that excuse). The 5.1 bluray mix is totally immersive. It would have been a nice bonus if you could have watched the projections while playing but on the other hand it might actually detract from the music. Extra tracks are a nice bonus and the concert from '74 sounds fantastic.

Otherwise....tat.
3 marbles - ?
Booklets - slick but not of much substance.
Scarf - ?
Coasters - unlikely to use as such given they come from such an expensive item.
Memorabilia - unmemorable

Box itself - the most important part of this set is the music. The box is designed so that 4 discs sit soundly in the bottom of the box fixed and 2 discs are loose in cardboard slip covers.The contents of the box then sit on top of the 4 main discs, meaning you have to lift it up every time you want to listen to one of the 4 main discs. Why not have them sit on the same holders with a cavity underneath to hold the scarf, marbles etc? This would mean the music was immediately accessible. Albeit it only adds 1 or 2 seconds to getting the music discs out it has already become an annoyance and I have placed the 4 discs in their own slip cases on top.

Mind you I will still buy the others. Another reviewer points out that we are not forced to buy the set if we don't want it, however you are currently "forced" to buy it if you otherwise wanted to hear the 5.1 dvd and bluray mixes as these are not available in that format separately (though the cynic in me thinks these may end up being released in a year or so time to make even more money).

I couldn't help myself - I'm an obsessive collector, a Floyd fan and I love box sets, so there was no way I'd be able to avoid buying the Immersion edition of DSOTM...

Unfortunately, what we have here is some superb musical treats for the Floyd fan, padded out with a load of unnecessary junk to bump the price up.

First, the music - the remaster of DSOTM is good as it has ever sounded. The quality of both the live performance disc and the bonus disc of demos and rarities are top-notch - they've been cleaned up superbly, and they sound dynamic and clear without a trace of tape hiss. Furthermore, the content itself is well worth hearing - Rick Wright's solo piano demo of "Us And Them" is worth the price of admission on its own, and the track from "Household Objects" is surprisingly good. If you are a Floyd fan, the bonus discs are must-listens.

The surround mixes of DSOTM are interesting - the inclusion of both Blu-Ray and DVD seems a bit unnecessary, as all the content is duplicated across both formats, and hardly justifies HD video, given its age - a single DVD-Video disc and a DVD-Audio disc would have been more than adequate, and could have held all the video and audio in both standard and HD formats.

And then we get onto the padding. The booklets are a disappointment - yes, a lot of photos, but the only words are the lyrics to the album, which we all have already, and a page from Storm Thorgerson telling yet again the story of how the band chose the cover artwork. Nothing from the band at all - there is so much that could have been included - interviews, reviews, reminiscences - but nothing. The concert ticket and backstage pass replicas are pointless. But the real crime is the scarf, marbles and coasters - I suspect the marbles are the ones Storm Thorgerson has clearly lost in order to come up with such a load of rubbish...

What Floyd should have done was to release a 5-disc set, with the three audio CDs, a DVD-Video and a DVD-Audio disc, and a decent booklet. �50 for that, and everyone would have been happy. Instead, we get this huge white elephant, and in order to hear the bonus material (that most serious Floyd fans would *really* want to hear), we have to pay for a lot of unnecessary junk that will surely only end up in landfill.

Could have been so much better...

Floyd / EMI really missed a chance here. This really could have been something truly incredible, but alas it's truly overblown and lacking in substance worthy of its ticket price.
Granted there may be a small percentage of fans out there that want a bit of memorabilia, there's nothing wrong with a bit of fun, but surely not when it's at the expense of the remainder of the package. I would imagine the vast majority of fans out there who are prepared to fork out the top dollars for a set such at this want quantity and quality, gimmicks I imagine would be well down the list.
In terms of what is provided here the live at Wembley set from 1974 really does sound astonishingly good, absolutely miles above even the soundboard recordings readily available for share from this era. However as this is also available as part of the 'Experience Edition', the question is what does one get that makes this upgrade worthwhile?

The 2 DVD's / 1 Blu-ray discs are chocked up with surround versions of the album and replications of the projections (concert screen reels) played on the big screen behind the band at the time. The fact that this is what makes up the vast majority of 3 of the 4 bonus discs (to the Experience Edition) is IMHO what lets the Immersion set down big time. Firstly the SACD version of the album is readily available and to my ears absolutely flawless. It simply has to be one of the best hi-res surround sound releases on the market, so i can't imagine there would be too many folk out there that would actually be excited by, or need further surround sound versions of the album.

The concert screen reels are pleasant enough, but can really only be seen as bonus material as there's no concert footage of the band playing to go along with them. What would have been ideal is to present a full DSOTM performance on DVD with these concert screen reels provided as a bonus angle. In fact this set is totally void of *any* footage of the band performing DSOTM (except for tiny snippets during a 25 minute doco that was made to promote the SACD release of the album back in 2003). What live footage we get is of Careful With That Axe Eugene and Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, and this is so good it's actually heartbreaking that no further footage was dug up, restored and provided.

The set is rounded out with another CD, and it features an early mix of the album by Alan Parsons, presumably before Chris Thomas was brought in. It's an interesting listen and great for fans buying the box set as no doubt they all know the album back to front. It's an aural version of spot the difference. Speak to Me hadn't been spliced together as an overture yet, Clare Torry is absent from Great Gig and the track is 30 sec shorter. Hearing the naked version of this song really highlights what a lift it received from her vocal improvisations. The dialogue interspersed throughout the final mix hadn't been added as yet here so it's also interesting to hear the album stripped of that, but when one is so used to it, it's quite noticeable in its absence. No heart (drum) beats bookend the album, rather a Moody Blues-esque mellotron-like chord commences the album, and a fade out of the final chord of Eclipse rounds it out. Also apparent now is how much effort was put into the final mix in terms of building the suite of songs that finish the album to a full climax and release. The segues of Any Colour You Like, Brain Damage and Eclipse kind of limp together here, but on the final mix each songs entry packs an increasingly bigger punch building a memorable finale to such a deserved classic album! The early mix whilst solid enough shows the band making an obvious improvement on Meddle, but still trying to define themselves. There's no doubt had they released this early mix it would have sold well, but it would certainly not have taken the band into the stratosphere the final mix did.

The remainder of the bonus tracks on this CD are definitely worthy and warrant inclusion in this set. The Hard Way (from the aborted Household Objects project) which, whilst not pre-empting any of the sound of Wish You Were Here, sounds years ahead of its time. In fact if the track had managed to get a bit of a groove happening it could almost be a proto-Massive Attack sound. I can only assume the synth-like sound is actually the wineglasses that are often made mention whenever the band refers to the session. It's a great sound and alone makes this track worth listening to more than once!
Two demos are included: Us and Them is just Rick plonking away on the piano (without vocals), and Money simply Roger on acoustic guitar giving a very earnest vocal perfomance (which I actually love!) His original splicing of money and cash register noises is tagged neatly on the end. The true highlights of this disc are the 3 live tracks from 1972. The band at this point were such an amazing live band and these tracks really highlight the jam-nature of the band at this point free from the controlled song structure they imposed on themselves as they became a bigger phenomenon. The Mortality Sequence contains just one run through of the chord progression that became Great Gig, the remainder being a lovely chordal improvisation from Rick on the organ. Any Colour You Like is relaxed and has beautiful playing from Gilmour and Rick, then Nick starts increasing his frequency of drum fills and the song for 30 odd seconds is totally rocking! The Travel Sequence appears in both live and studio form, and I assume was dropped from the album in favour of On The Run (they both share 16ths on the hi-hats) and for being another instrumental. It would have been filler on the album itself but makes for a great outtake/bonus track!

However the high points of this disc again highlight what could have been! Why not another full set of DSOTM? Imagine if this box set contained the prototype live version (from 1972) as well as the aforementioned '74 Wembley set. I'd gladly trade my marbles and scarf for that!! Who in their right mind wouldn't?? The sound quality of the '72 tracks featured here isn't as strong as the '74 set, but I doubt there'd be too much complaint about that, it's still miles above bootleg quality and very enjoyable. I guess tellingly the 3 tracks supplied are all instrumental, so perhaps messers Gilmour and Waters vetoed their vocal performances from this particular gig. If that's the case that's a real shame, being a bonus feature I could live with the vocals being off mike, cutting out, or even being a bit out of tune. It definitely wouldn't be a deal breaker.

Finally the last real let down of the set is the booklets. The two booklets enclosed should have been reduced to one, and a further booklet should have been commissioned by EMI giving extensive interviews with the surviving members of the band (even interspersing handpicked quotes from Rick) and session engineers. There's no discussion of the live material (audio or visual) or concert screen reels, no discussion of the Household Objects project or the dropped Travel Sequence track... All of which would have made killer (not to mention essential) reading.

Genesis really set the benchmark for reissuing their back catalogue and genuinely giving their fan base what they wanted in terms of a value packed upgrade. 2 box sets issuing much in the way of live tracks and rarities, followed up some years later by solid sonic upgraded SACD surround sound mixes for each album that came with bonus DVD's of interviews/making of docos + TV appearances and concert footage (some broadcast quality interspersed with some bootleg quality, but at least a document for fans to enjoy) Those wishing to dive in for box sets were rewarded with further bonus tracks and DVD footage + essay booklets. All in all a pretty simple and satisfying benchmark to at least try and reach.

Alas with Floyd we have been given gimmicks and a just a taste of what could have been a truly worthwhile and immersing experience.