From quadrupedal to quadraphonic
After spending the last 20 minutes crawling up and down my stairs in a bid to build some more strength for my trip to Lisses in a few weeks, I returned to my computer to find that the Torrent I've been downloading for the last few days has finally finished. I recently read that a high quality transfer has been made of the quad mix of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon album. In the 1970's there were a number of quadraphonic albums produced and released on both vinyl and quad 8 track cartridges. This was well ahead of its time really, and it's only recently that we've started to see multi channel surround mixes of music appearing on SACD and DVD-A. A few months ago a new 5.1 mix of Dark Side Of The Moon was released on Super Audio CD. Being a big fan of the album, I rushed out to buy this and was very impressed with it overall. But for die hard Pink Floyd fans, the original Alan Parsons quad mix of DSOTM was still the definitive version. In the last couple of years, DTS CD versions of this have appeared on the internet, but these were derived from Q4/Q8 tapes or the quad vinyl releases. Unfortunately these sources were subject to the ravages of time and were a long way from the original studio masters. With no prospect of EMI releasing the original quadraphonic mixes, somebody with access to the masters took it upon himself to ensure that the original mix doesn't get lost forever. Hence the recent DVD-A version! Considering the fact that this is essentially a 'bootleg', it's an absolutely faultless transfer from the original masters, and superbly authored with menus, on screen artwork during playback and Dolby Digital & DTS encoded versions for anyone with a standard DVD video player. But it's the MLP Lossless soundtrack which most accurately conveys the subtleties and dynamic range of the mix. In addition to the 2 front & 2 rear channels, an additional sub channel has been derived from the low frequency content of the main channels. On a properly set up system, this fills in the bottom of the frequency range nicely (and pisses the neighbours off at night!). The album is a fairly big download (3.43GB), and as BitTorrent is basically a P2P system and the bandwidth isn't guaranteed, it takes some considerable time to download. You'll then need to burn the disc image to a DVD. Trust me, it's well worth it though!!
I'm off for another listen now, but here's a couple of pics of me marvelling at the whole experience. Please try to ignore the crap wallpaper!
posted by Obsidian @ 8:35 pm
5 Comments:
Nice! LOL
Off topic, do you have Sky+?
Heh, you certainly need to spend less money on AV stuff and more on interior design ;)
Yes, I do have sky+. Sky HD actually!
You're right about the interior design. The only problem is that all the equipment & cabling in the room makes it very difficult to actually decorate. I suppose I'll have to do something about it soon though as it's the same wallpaper I had when I was a kid!
So that's in your bedroom?? LOL cool
We used to have Sky+, we had it for a year, but my Mom got rid of it as we watched too much TV.
Sky+ is bloody brilliant, so useful! But yes, since we got rid of it, I watch practically no TV anymore. I loved it for sitcoms on UKTV Gold, Friends on E4 (big up NYC!) and My Wife + Kids on Trouble. I have none of these anymore... :(
One thing I noticed though, after a year of using it, the hard drive capacity vastly decreased with use. At the moment it's empty (obviously), there's nothing recorded, as I could not watch it if there was anything saved, and it's only showing 43% free space. How long have you had Plus, Paul? Is yours like that?
I've only had Sky+ for 3 months or so. I haven't noticed any reduction in the capacity of the hard drive. Maybe it's due to software updates which get downloaded onto the hard drive, or possibly the boxes partition off bad sectors of the drive if they become corrupt over time (Maybe).
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