Pink Floyd DSOTM congested?

[net-david]

On track 7, "Us and Them", at about 3 minutes, the sound gets very congested. Almost as if the original studio recording tape was over driven to saturating. I have several versions of the album, including the Mobile Fidelity UDCD 517 and the SACD.

I've gone back and noted the exact times:
2:50
4:22
5:53

I've tried it on 3 different systems, the best being:
Philips 963SA
Musical Fidelity A3 24
Musical Fidelity A308 integrated
B&W Nautilus 805
REL Stadium III

I get the best sound from the Mobile Fidelity Ultradisk.

Does it sound this way to anyone else?

--David

[ashwin]

Hi,

I don't have the CD with me now, but do you mean the parts "Forward he cried...", the sax part and lastly "Out of my way, It's a busy day..." ? If so, then yes, sounds the same to me too. I thought I had a bad CD or my discman was spoiling the sound. (I've only played it on my discman, so I don't have any comparative data)

Come to think of it, it sounds a bit like the inner groove distortion I get on some of my LPs...

- Ashwin

[net-david]

Yes, that is it. I was wondering if it was only me, and I needed to keep looking for a better system.

Then again, any justification for more toys...

David

[KBK]

yes it is conjested at that passage. I have the Mofi original run LP, the Canadian Harvest LP, the US issue LP, the British LP pressing, the Japanese LP pressing, the original CD, the 20th anniversary CD, and the SACD release.

[Rob M]

Originally posted by KBK
I have the Mofi original run LP, the Canadian Harvest LP, the US issue LP, the British LP pressing, the Japanese LP pressing, the original CD, the 20th anniversary CD, and the SACD release.

What, no eight track?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...&category=1601

[Thunau]

Originally posted by net-david
On track 7, "Us and Them", at about 3 minutes, the sound gets very congested. Almost as if the original studio recording tape was over driven to saturating. I have several versions of the album, including the Mobile Fidelity UDCD 517 and the SACD.

I've gone back and noted the exact times:
2:50
4:22
5:53

I've tried it on 3 different systems, the best being:
Philips 963SA
Musical Fidelity A3 24
Musical Fidelity A308 integrated
B&W Nautilus 805
REL Stadium III

I get the best sound from the Mobile Fidelity Ultradisk.

Does it sound this way to anyone else?

--David

I have it on SACD and CD. The player is Philips SACD1000. From my experience in recording I would say, that's how it was mixed. What you hear is a passage that should go about 6 to 10 dB louder then the rest of the song because of all the additional parts that are mixed in there plus the natural dynamic of the performance goes up. The 2 mix ( or 5 mix in case of surround sound mix) bus on the console normally has a compressor patched in to keep the average levels in a certain dynamic window to ensure pleasant listening experience. After all it's pop music we're talking about. Capturing reality is not the goal.
Most compressors when hit hard tend to sound like that. Some are better at that task then others. I don't know what they used back in the day at Abbey Road. Probably some custom Helios or Neve job.
It (the congestion) might have been avoided by more careful orchestation/arrangement or manual riding of the faders. OTOH, maybe that's what they wanted in the first place, maybe it sounded great to them at the time of the mix and they went with it.
Another possibility is that some damage was done during bouncing of tracks. Back then they were limited to 16 tracks, so if you had a lot of parts you would submix them to one or two tracks on the tape to free up some tracks for more overdubs. During submixing the tape might have been oversaturated and the source tracks ereased and replaced with other instruments making remixing impossible.
A lot of things might have happened to result in that sound. Be glad that you hear some obvious compression artifacts only in a couple of spots. Most today's pop and rock sounds like that 99% of the time. Loud and strained. Personally I can't stand it. DSOTM is compressed but within reason. At least there is no brickwall peak limiting that tends to ruin the sound to me when overdone.

[ace3000_1]

Most today's pop and rock sounds like that 99% of the time

I totally agree on that note, the quality of the music recording today is crap, not all but most of the comercial stuff we tend to hear. What anoys me is you can have the best stereo amp and speakers on the planet, but you will only get out of it what you put into it at the source.

Trev