- Audio CD
- Number of Discs: 1
- Format: Import
- Label: Import
- ASIN: 7799628642
- Other Editions: Audio CD | Audio Cassette | Vinyl | UMD Mini for PSP
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (216 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 833,617 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
One of the most famous albums of all time, Dark Side Of The Moon sold 25 million copies in its first 25 years of release. It continues to be a favourite, with 20 per cent of those sales occurring in the period since it first came out on CD, a medium to which it is ideally suited, especially in its current carefully remastered form. Dark Side Of The Moon was the first album that Pink Floyd decided to break in live before attempting to record, with the debut performance of what they then called Eclipse just over a year before the final release date. When they finally retired to Abbey Road with top sound engineer Alan Parsons, state-of-the-art 16-track recording equipment and the new Dolby technology to hand, it was to produce one of the great pieces of studio art. Covering a range of styles, this was the last album (prior to Roger Waters' departure in the early 1980s) to whose writing the other members of Pink Floyd contributed significantly. Nevertheless, it remains a stunningly coherent package, bound together by surreal fragments of speech (mostly gleaned from asking questions of the doorman at the studio) and Waters' bold and bleak lyrics. Often reputed to be about former member Syd Barrett's decline into schizophrenia, in fact Waters has said the lyrics "were a lot about ordinariness" and dealt with people's responses to the increasing insanity of the pressures of everyday life. Some of the extraordinary sound effects used came from the most unlikely sources--the coins at the start of "Money" from Waters tossing handfuls of change into an industrial food-mixer that his wife, a potter, used to mix clay. Whatever the medium, a new standard for attention to detail and production values had been set and the world of studio recording would never be the same again.--James Swift
Review
The official site for the umpteenth re-release of this old chestnut presents you with a daunting array of statistics that, if you're under the age of 30, will probably seem like the ravings of (appropriately enough) a lunatic. For if, by some freak circumstance (lost in Pacific jungle for thirty years/coma/just plain don't like lousy guitar bands etc.), you hold this CD in your hands for the first time, listen up: Dark Side Of The Moon spent an incredible ELEVEN CONSECUTIVE YEARS in the top 100 and has notched up a total of FOURTEEN YEARS lodged in the same place. That's a lot of Lear jets and football teams. But what new can be said?
Well, it now comes with an extra layer of new enhanced 5.1 surroundsound thingummy with (naturally) Dobly [sic]. And it's got a lovely new stained glass effect cover courtesy of Storm Thorgerson and his hilariously named Hipgnosis cohorts. And the music?
Contextually speaking this was the Floyd's saving grace. By 1972 they'd firmly claimed the avant garde (read: musically unadventurous but prone to hitting large gongs and setting fire to stuff onstage) art rock mainstream as their own playground. Yet these middle-class boys still craved, like, bread, man. After a prolonged period of fumbling soundtracks for European arthouse movies they'd finally emerged from under the shadow of founder/visionary/lost-marble icon, Syd Barrett with a coherently beautiful album, Meddle. Roger Waters had some big ideas about madness, life, death and all that deep stuff. EMI had a rather splendid studio with some top-notch engineers. Six months later...voila!
What made this concoction so popular at the time was a series of coincidences. The western world was now fully stereoed-up; the band hooked up with an immaculate engineer by the name of Alan Parsons (yes, that one with the project) and last, but not least, the band bothered to write some really fine songs. This was a long way from the half-baked nonsense that had plagued Ummagumma or Atom Heart Mother. Gilmour's guitar was now exquisitely tasteful (the heart still breaks over that little phrase about 36 seconds into ''Breathe'') and zen-like in what he could leave out (check the most underrated track ''Any Colour You Like''). The sound effects are as hackneyed as a 70s stereo demonstration record (that this album effectively replaced in most hi-fi stores at the time), yet the overall flow of the album still satisfies as it merges existential ballads (''Time'', ''Us And Them'') with cynical rockers (''Money'') and arena-impressing freak outs (''The Great Gig In The Sky'').
Too much scrutiny reveals a rhythm section that's laughably leaden, song structures that employ the same descending runs that appear on every Floyd album since Meddle (cf: ''Echoes'') and lyrics that embarrass with their sixth-form triteness. Yet how many writers will be saying the same of Radiohead's cosy attacks on globalisation and 21st century ennui on OK Computer (which owes such a huge amount to this album) in thirty years time? Ultimately it matters little. DSOTM is still a lovely record made brittle by overuse. One almost wishes that instead of spicing it up one more time, EMI had deleted it for a while to give us all room to breathe again... --Chris Jones
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Dark Side of the Moon is a timeless album that is still worthy of its status as one of the greatest albums of all time. The quality of this re-release is exemplary, but if you are going to re-buy this album, then why not 'invest' an extra few quid and get the version with the live album?
My only slight warning with this re-release is the cardboard cover - because of the black artwork, it picks up finger marks very easily, but that aside, a worthy re-package and re-launch of a very special album indeed.
My only slight warning with this re-release is the cardboard cover - because of the black artwork, it picks up finger marks very easily, but that aside, a worthy re-package and re-launch of a very special album indeed.
38 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
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).
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).
45 of 48 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase
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...
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...
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Not another DSOTM review?
I have lived with DSOTM since I first discovered it in 1975. I hadn't played it in a while till I bought the new reissue, but what has struck me revisiting it is what a wondrous... Read more
Published 5 days ago by Fishbonealice
The great gig in the sky
This album has often been called an 'audiophile's wet dream' or 'hi-fi for snobs' and it's known as the best selling prog rock record ever! Read more
Published 24 days ago by Lord Anon
the darks ide of the moon
very good. arrived really quickly, got it for my hubby and he really likes it. would defiantely recommend this cd of Pink Floyd
Published 1 month ago by D. Peters
cds scratched!!!
Beautiful edition. I liked all of its content. But how to store CDs, is a joke, mine came loose, scratched.
Published 2 months ago by James Floyd
It's a CD.
The CD arrived in the condition stated on the Amazon site. It arrived on time so all is well. Not my cup of tea but the recipient was over the moon.
Published 2 months ago by Honest Guv
The Dark Side Of The Moon
Probably, quite simply, THE rock album of all time (so far). Down load it, listen to the meaningful lyrics, listen to the music. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Gareth Jones
2 disc version
Bought the 2 disc version for my iPod for under a tenner, and the live version is awesome. True - the quality isn't as good as the 35 year old vinyl. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Jimothy
Superb Quality
The sound quality of this is perfect. When new it is very difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between this and the MP3
Published 4 months ago by Jamesd512
Dark Side Of The Moon reissue
Lokked forward to this when I ordered it, as I have had reissues before which have been rubbish. But I needn't have worried - this one is excellent - even better than the original... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mr. M. A. Cassell
Christmas gift
Christmas gift for my mum, having finally rid herself of tapes. She loves the CD and is very happy that this was in her stocking.
Published 4 months ago by franni
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