ATC Loudspeakers Found On ""The Dark Side Of The Moon""

31-Mar-03

Few albums in the history of popular music can rival the success of Pink Floyd's ""The Dark Side Of The Moon."" Artistically ambitious and blatantly appealing at the same time, ""Dark Side"" remains a staple thirty years after its release.To celebrate that milestone, the band decided to re-release the ""The Dark Side Of The Moon"" for the first time in 5.1 surround on Super Audio CD (SACD). The highly regarded producer and engineer James Guthrie, who has worked with the band for more than two decades, was asked to handle the remix. Although he happily accepted the assignment, Guthrie says the decision was not made without a bit of trepidation.""This was a very difficult 5.1 mix. Not from a musical point of view, because the record really lends itself to a three-dimensional treatment, but from the point of view that everyone knows the original mix so well. It is indelibly printed on our minds. We've had 30 years to live with it, and some people don't want that image to be altered. Knowing that you are about to start work on something controversial can be unsettling.""""The issues with a 5.1 remix all come down to one question -- have you retained the emotional impact of the songs? All this technology is meaningless if you've turned the album into a video game.""An unabashed analog fan, Guthrie wanted to mix from the original 16-track tapes. Fortunately, the source material was catalogued at Abbey Road and remained in good shape. The studio made copies for safekeeping and sent the originals to Guthrie's das boot studio in Northern California.""As this is a conceptual work, we agreed that I should mix the entire album and then play it to the individual band members for their input. That way they could experience everything in context.""Monitoring, says James Guthrie, is the most important element of any mix environment. ""The speakers are the most important pieces of equipment in my studio. They're your window to the outside world.""In order to faithfully reproduce the sound he created at das boot, Guthrie made sure that all the band members experienced his mixes through the same ATC speaker line that he created them on. ""ATC speakers are simply fantastic. I cannot say enough about them. The imaging is unlike anything I've experienced. The dispersion characteristic is exceptional, and the speakers always remain phase-coherent.""The ""Dark Side Of The Moon"" 5.1 SACD was previewed on March 24 during a special reception hosted by Capitol Records and Sony Electronics in the Cullman Hall of the Universe, which is located along with the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It will be played on a 5.1 monitoring system identical to the one James Guthrie uses in his studio, consisting of five SCM150ASLs and two SCM0.1-15 subwoofers, courtesy of ATC.ATC's drivers are manufactured in-house to exacting tolerances and are renowned for their many design innovations, such as the company's Soft Dome midrange driver. Situated in Aston Down in rural Gloucestershire, England, ATC was established in London in 1974 by acoustics engineer and musician Bill Woodman.For more information about ATC, visit www.atc.gb.net.

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