Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now
Customer Testimonials for Dark Side of the Moon
I admit to some bias when it comes to DSOTM. I must have played more than a hundred copies over the last forty-odd years. Whenever I was sure I understood exactly which copies had the best sound, again and again I would be proved wrong.
We only found out what the best sounding versions were about five or six years ago. We did that by doing shootout after shootout with every version we could lay our hands on, starting around 2005. We even did a shootout for two different Mobile Fidelity pressings many years ago, which we think still makes for some good reading almost twenty years later.
It’s especially good reading for those who don’t appreciate how dramatic pressing variations can be for even quality-controlled limited editions. The comparison of the two MoFi’s centers around the idea that midrange tonality is by far the most important quality on Dark Side, and that, surprisingly to some audiophiles, but obviously not to us, there are MoFi pressings with a correct midrange and there are those without.
Our Take on DSOTM Pressings
The domestic pressings we have auditioned over the years have never made it into a real shootout. They have always sounded far too flat and veiled to be taken seriously. There are some very good sounding Pink Floyd pressings on domestic vinyl — Wish You Were Here and The Wall can both sound amazing on domestic vinyl — but Dark Side is not one of them in our experience.
The Doug Sax-mastered Heavy Vinyl version from 2003 we played when it came out was way too bright and phony to these ears. We hated it and made that clear to our readers at the time.
We came across a very early British pressing about fifteen years ago, the one with the solid blue triangle label, but it was not as good as other pressings we were playing back then and we never bought another one.
We’ve liked a lot of later UK pressings over the years, but we don’t go out of our way to buy those anymore now that we have heard the really amazing pressings we like now.
As I said, we discovered the killer stampers about five years ago, and that showed us an out of this world Dark Side we had no idea could even exist.
We have a name for records like those. We call them breakthrough pressings, and we used to award them a sonic grade of more than Three Pluses from time to time.