I've had many versions of this perennial favorite. Heck, right now I have three versions of the studio release of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon alone. The original CD version, the 30th Anniversary hybrid SACD and, this, the new 2011 remaster. Although I have yet to hear the MFSL rendition, to me this is the best effort to date for a DSotM CD.

For one thing, thankfully, they didn't compress the music. It's seems to level match fairly well with the other Dark Side CDs I have. Clarity seems to have improved also. It's so clear that it makes the others seem a bit muddied. The great part is not etched. Meaning it sounds smooth while the music is very well defined.

The noise floor seems to be lower on the 2011 remaster than either the original or 30th Ann. That makes the music more dynamic with the quieter background.

Overall the improvements of the 2011 remaster of DSotM are worth getting. The sound differences may not be dramatic but are certainly audible and make this classic even better.

That's only half the story though. The Experience edition comes with the '74 live performance of this great album. THIS is what makes paying the small premium over the Discovery edition well worth it. Not only are the boys in terrific form giving an outstanding show (much better than the Pulse show 20 years later) but the sound quality is amazing. If the original studio version weren't so well known and this 1974 concert album were released years earlier, this could almost have become the definitive version.

Highly recommended just for this CD alone. Add the well done 2011 remaster and it deserves a 5 star rating.

So here it is... the Dark Side 'Immersion' set. This is the fifth version I've owned of the legendary album, and I would have been happy to own just the Blu-Ray disc alone here, but of course it is not available separately. That said, I'm happy to own Disc 6, the 'Extra Audio Tracks,' mainly for the Alan Parsons Mix. It's interesting to hear for historical value. The various ephemera, marbles and so on, are kinda fun, but I'm not the type of collector who looks for such items.

As for the music, the Quad Mix sounds entirely fantastic on the Blu-Ray disc. Regarding the central Dark Side version of this reissue, the James Guthrie 2011 remaster, I really cannot detect any difference between this and the 2003 remaster that was done for the 30th anniversary of Dark Side. Perhaps my listening mind is too taken up in the details of the amazing yet ultra-familiar album experience to notice any subtleties. The Wembley '74 live album, which I'm listening to as I write this, is a solid concert representation of the album. The sound quality is very good considering the age of the recording. The additional video concert footage is all relatively good, though some of it suffers a bit from poor camera angles and slightly muddy sound mix.

The documentary here is more of promotional vehicle, brief but moderately informative. The 'Classic Albums' story on Dark Side is really a much more thorough and interesting dissection of the album's creation and would have been a better addition to this set. I guess the business arrangements for that were too difficult or something.

Packaging-wise, this is not the most well organized box set, as opposed to something like the Pixies box. There are slots for Discs 1-4 built into the set, but everything else is just loose. Discs 5 & 6 (including the Blu-Ray disc, to me the most important item) are in cardboard sleeves, but there are no designated slots for them within the box. They're just dropped in with everything else.

The problem with some albums (most of The Beatles' catalogue, Zeppelin, Radiohead, etc) is so much has been written about them there's not a lot new to say. For DARK SIDE OF THE MOON I figured I'd examine the record more in the context of their catalogue overall, as this is not very often examined in Amazon reviws.

As I've said in other reviews, Pink Floyd has always been a weird band. There's a reason why they're considered the ultimate space-rock band. And while there are other albums in their catalogue that are even spacier and more strange than the perennial favorite DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (ATOM HEART MOTHER and PIPER AT THE GATES OF DOWN, to name but two), it is here, on this album, that the band trimmed back their wild experiments to manageable songs. And once the general public figured out what Pink Floyd was capable of, they bought the record in droves.

Pink Floyd has a sizeable catalogue that dates before DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. While the Pink Floyd Faithful know these albums, a lot of fans don't know these records, and if they go looking for another DARK SIDE, they are often puzzled at the music they do find. There's a reason for that.

Pre-1973, Pink Floyd was very much on the outer edges of rock music. Like The Grateful Dead, they played by their own rules, and invented and subverted their own musical forms into something druggy, ethereal, and far beyond the scope of any normal popsong. Listening to early Pink Floyd records is like an audio-acid trip, and it's surprising that not only did they get to release such experimental music, with no real chance of getting radioplay or singles, but they got to release so many albums of it. With today's market and expectations and pro-tools mentality of the quest for the perfect popsong that will be the next big hit, the early PF records would never have been released.

All this changed in 1972, when Pink Floyd released their criminally underrated soundtrack OBSCURED BY CLOUDS. The true precursor to DARK SIDE, OBSCURED was recorded just as the initial sessions for DARK SIDE began. Moving away from the side-long suites and long winding instrumentals, OBSCURED features 10 songs, only four of which are instrumentals, with the other six songs being very akin to the DARK SIDE songs. It is with OBSCURED that Pink Floyd began writing music that would be much more accessible to the general record-buying public.

Pink Floyd continued in the direction they began with OBSCURED BY CLOUDS. Streamlining their music, Pink Floyd forwent the rather bizarre experiments that made up the bulk of their previous work. But don't think they sold out. Everything in DARK SIDE has precedent in their previous work.

While there's nothing that truly sounded like DARK SIDE in 1973, the music sounds very much like a culmination of all their previous experimentation (not counting Barret's PIPER) dating from 1968 to 1972. But rather than let their audio love of sound effects get away with them ("Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast"), or draw their often fascinating instrumental music to gargantuan proportions ("Echoes", "Atom Heart Mother") that only prog fans will wade through, the band took the elements of their overall sound, streamlined it, and used much more accessible songwriting, but still being true to their artistic vision.

And it is a vision and a sound that a lot of people love. DARK SIDE epitomizes what the band was capable of. Filled with sound effects, spacey music, turbocharged [turbocharted] instrumentals, DARK SIDE takes elements from all of the band's previous albums and utilizes them here. A lot of the sound effect work is rather famous, especially the interview snippits that engineer Alan Parsons and the band sprinkled throughout the album. Paul McCartney was interviewed, but seasoned by years of media coverage, the band felt his answers were too guarded and not as off-the-cuff as they wanted. The "I'm drunk" line was by Henry McCullough. There's also a barely audible orchestral version of The Beatles "Ticket To Ride" that can be briefly heard at the end of "Eclipse".

Pink Floyd always had the potential to be not only great musicians and rock artists but also commercially. But let's not kid ourselves. Without DARK SIDE, they would not be the commercial juggernauts that they have become today. Had they broke up with OBSCURED, today Pink Floyd would be one of those cult bands that a lot of people haven't heard of, but that those who do know them find them very interesting.

And that is why DARK SIDE is their definitive album, and one of the biggest selling albums ever. It is here on DARK SIDE that Pink Floyd went from being beyond a cult band with some rather esoteric, rather impenetrable music, to being a very successful band with the same sonic identity, but more streamlined and much more accessible to the general pubic.

(As far s the whole Dark Side of the Rainbow phenomena goes, where Wizard of Oz and the album syncs, apparently it is unintentional, or so the band claims. Pretty bizaare how well they sync if indeed it is unintentional).

Once in a while, a rock band or other musical entity puts out an album that, quite simply, changes the face of music history. And yet, Pink Floyd was a rather unlikely group of musical innovators: An excellent singer/guitarist(David Gilmour) who was, until the release of this album, best known merely as "Syd Barrett's replacement," (Barrett, still regarded by many fans as the band's true musical genius, had recently taken leave of his senses and was apparently holed up somewhere watching the floor relate to the walls); a fine bassist/writer/singer/perfectionist (Roger Waters) still tortured by his fatherless upbringing; a low-key keyboardist and rather good singer and writer (Rick Wright) who stayed in the background as much as possible; and finally, a rather thoughtful percussionist and sound-effects wizard (Nick Mason), whose most lasting claim to fame would be as the man who vocalized the chilling spoken word threat in the band's classic "One Of These Days". An unlikely band of innovators, to be sure. And yet, Pink Floyd was properly positioned in the right place at the right time with the right sound. The year was 1973, the musical revolution started in the sixties was still in full swing, FM radio was in it's infancy (Recently taken over by hippie-types who longed for hours and hours of nice, spacy, commercial-free programming). In a word, rock music was the touchstone of our generation, just as television had been the touchstone of our parent's generation, and computers would be to our childen's generation. Those of us in high school or college spent hours every night and weekend, gathered around the stereo in someone's apartment or room, getting high, drunk, or just daydreaming, pondering such important questions as "What makes Teflon stick to the pan?" (Thank you, Gallagher!) In many of these listening spaces, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon was the album of choice, sometimes listened to over and over again. The mad mutterings of "Speak to Me," the celestial swirl of "Breathe", the jet-propulsive paranoia of "On the Run," and "Time," a favorite subject of young questers everywhere (along with madness, death, and pizza), "The Great Gig in the Sky" (with Claire Torry's incredible vocal-cries of universal anguish, "Money", first-rate blues rock, "Us and Them", hypnotic yet thought-provoking, "Any Colour You Like," sheer beauty, "Brain Damage", the madman inside all of us, and "Eclipse," the perfect thematic coda. All received by us, the grateful listeners, in our various states of consciousness (altered or otherwise), and then purchased, time and again, from music stores. Dark Side of the Moon was the ONE ALBUM that every rock fan (and many wouldn't otherwise be caught dead listening to rock music) had to own. Why??? After thirty years, I can offer only a tentative answer: Most people cannot stand to ruminate for long about ourselves and our place in the universe, yet every human being on the face of this earth will at sometime wonder: Why are we here??? The Pink Floyd, through this classic masterwork, holds no answers for us, yet it is as if they are offering to accompany us as we journey toward self-discovery, making the transition easier, soothing the pain, quieting the hurt even as they force us to see inside ourselves. Thanks, guys, from all of your fellow voyagers. I think I can safely speak for many when I say the road to self-awareness would have been much bumpier if I had not traveled it in your celestial vehicle. I say once, and I say again, SHINE ON, YOU CRAZY DIAMONDS and rock on, even unto the darkest part of the dark side of the moon.

*** THIS REVIEW IS FOR THE 2011 SINGLE-DISC VERSION ***

I've reviewed the 2011 remasters of Pink Floyd's "Meddle" (1971), "Obscured By Clouds" (1972) and "Wish You Were Here" (1975) - all three are sonically amazing but hugely disappointing on the packaging front (miniscule booklets that exclude original details and don't expand your knowledge a jot). It's pretty much an identical story here. But let's get to the details first...

The vinyl LP "The Dark Side Of The Moon" was originally released 10 March 1973 on Harvest SMAS-11163 in the USA and 24 March 1973 in the UK on Harvest Records SHVL 804. This 26 September 2011 single-disc version (released 27 Sep 2011 in the USA) on EMI 50999 028955 2 9 is a straightforward 10-track remaster of that Number 1 studio album. A 2CD 'Experience' Edition and a 6-Disc 'Immersion' Box Set are also released Monday 26 September 2011 (see separate entries for details). This single-disc 'Discovery' reissue comes in a gatefold card sleeve with a newly laid-out 12-page inlay inside (total playing time 42:59 minutes).

[Note: original copies of the vinyl LP famously came with 2 posters, 2 stickers and a titled 'Pink Floyd The Dark Side Of The Moon' sticker on the front - this new issue doesn't feature any of these original items, but instead simply uses the now familiar untitled 'prism' artwork]

Like all the other albums in this 14-title reissue series - "The Dark Side Of The Moon" has been mastered by JAMES GUTHRIE and JOEL PLANTE at the Das Boot Recording Studios in Tahoe in California (Guthrie is a Sound Engineer associated with the band since 1978). The original 1st generation master tapes have obviously been given a thorough going over because it truly feels like each segment has had a staggering amount of time spent on them - worrying out every single nuance possible. The audio result is truly impressive.

God knows how many times this 'cash cow' of an album has been reissued on CD - and yet another version will probably make even the most die-hard of fans yawn and even feel a little angry. But - outside of the amazing SACD version of 2003 - this new 2011 'Discovery' edition is absolutely the best it's ever going to be for those of us with a lesser budget. The now famous opening heart-beat and 'loony' voices of "Speak To Me" sound extraordinary - which in turn lead into the sonic wall of "Breathe (In The Air)" - and it's a WOW. The remaster hasn't dampened anything or over-amplified it for the sake of volume (the dreaded loudness wars so many talk of) - it's just 'there' - all the instruments present and swirling around your speakers in superlative clarity. And while "Time", "Money" and the lovely "Us And Them" were always going to be audio wonderland with their myriad effects and top-drawer Alan Parsons production values - it's the last track on Side 1 that impresses the most. The truly gorgeous and innovative "The Great Gig In The Sky" is on the 'Immersion' mega box set in its original bare-bones state - later beefed up with the incredible Acapella Vocal of CLARE TORRY - and what a smart move that was. Even in its very quiet opening and ending passages - it sounds BEAUTIFUL - and not for the first time brought a tear to a weary eye. I also love the "Any Colour You Like" instrumental on Side 2 (some DJs have been mixing it in with Dance and Funk 12" in their sets) and by the time "Eclipse" finishes this concept of concept albums (lyrics above) - it's very hard not to be impressed at the work Guthrie and Plante have done here.

I wish I could say the same for the staggeringly unimaginative packaging. The 'Pink Floyd' logo you see in all the photos advertising these new reissues turns out to be a sticker on the outer shrink-wrap that gets lost the second you unpeel it. The card sleeves are like The Beatles 09/09/09 EMI reissues - glossy and flimsy - so they smudge with finger prints the second you open them and are easy to bend and crease. The CD itself has the new generic artwork (the sticker design on the outer packaging) repeated in different colour variations throughout the series - a sort of Turquoise and Pale Green for "Meddle", a garish Red and Pink for "Obscured By Clouds", Blue and Green for "Wish You Were Here" and here - Black And Grey for "Dark Side..." But where's the beautiful band poster, the two Hipgnosis-designed stickers, the deep blue triangle/prism Harvest label of the English LP? This ludicrous new design has no relevance to the original and speaking of the disc itself - there's no protective gauze sleeve for the CD either so it will scuff on repeated plays. The inner glossy gatefold could easily have featured these - instead we get two useless sepia-tinted pictures of the pyramids - how imaginative...

But the skimpy booklet is the biggest disappointment. It has the lyrics of the original album (which were on the inner gatefold) reset in the new booklet against a background of god-awful Storm Thorgerson images. Of the millions of words written about this most famous of rock records, there isn't even a history on the album. There's no pictures of European and Worldwide 7" sleeves for "Money" and "Time" (singles lifted off the album), no pictures of the band, no 7" edit versions etc - naught to get your teeth into. OK - it does look nice and does the job adequately - but that's all. It's a lazy-assed approach on behalf of EMI and undermines the sterling work done on the sound front. I hate to come across like some nick-picking fan boy here, but it would have been nice to actually 'discover' something on this so-called 'Discovery' version (docked a star for that).

To sum up - the remaster is gobsmacking - a stone five stars - but sadly we get mediocre presentation that completely undermines the original power of the album when you got it in your hands all those decades ago. Still - with an opening salvo price of less than a tenner in most stores - and the truly beautiful sonic upgrade thrown in - the casual listener is advised to dig in, rediscover and enjoy.

Die-hard fans however might want to wait for the Japanese Editions that will inevitably arrive in 2012 on the far superior SHM-CD format (a better make of CD playable on all players). With their faithfully reproduced artwork and audiophile reproduction - they may give your bank manager a cold sweat - but they will absolutely be the ones to get if the best is all you'll accept.

Despite my gripes about presentation - "Meddle", "Obscured By Clouds" and the wonderful "Wish You Were Here" should be your next port of call. I suspect many music lovers will feel exactly the same...

PS: fans of memorabilia should note that for this launch - HMV London is giving away a titled banded-envelope containing 6 colour postcards in the same style as the one in the original "Wish You Were Here" LP (girl diving into a lake) for customers who purchase 2 titles in this reissue campaign. They're gorgeous and will probably become future collectables.