MFSL "Dark Side of the Moon" gold CD source in question

Stumbled across this on the web the other day...scroll down the page roughly half way to the section covering the MFSL 2nd pressing of the "Dark Side of the Moon" LP. At the end of this section is a heading entitled Dark Side of the Moon LP Production Note. Former MFSL employee Gregg Schnitzer has some interesting insights on the "Dark Side of the Moon" gold CD editions.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PFArchives/DMFSL.htm

 

Nice article. I'm still not convinced about the exact amount of LPs of Dark Side, which were pressed. I'll bet there were more than 25,000!

 

"
Listening Test: In the late 1980s, a blind listening test was conducted at the University of Miami. An MFSL record, cassette,
and CD of the same album were played to a group of listeners, and the Original Master Recording High Fidelity Cassette was
consistently picked as the best sounding copy."

 

Any stamper information regarding the LP used in this test

They weren't all equal.

And I wonder how the VHS 16/44 transfer sounds too? Probably a couple dozen in existence.

 

And that's a cassette made from a digital master, yes? Also, a cassette with Dolby B encoding? Interesting.

Gardo

 

So many variables to those results. Could've been a scratchy record. Maybe they played the tape back without the Dolby engaged making it brighter. And don't forget the cassette tape itself, even with the Dolby on, will add a certain amount of tape compression which they may have liked. I'm assuming this wasn't a group of audiophiles.

 

Not all cassettes at MFSL were duped from digital masters, though all that were sold publicly were (from what I understand). Dolby B, BASF chrome tape. Metal tape was sometimes used, but I forget who manufactured it.

They could have been auditioning one of their production tapes, some of which were duped in real time from the master on the highest quality cassette decks, probably tweaked to the hilt by techs at MFSL.

 

I have that cassette!

 

Robert,

How is the sound?....just curious!

Bob

 

It was a question of *preference*after all...conducted at a university.
<big smiley here>

btw,

"Cassette Production: MFSL Original Master Recording High Fidelity Cassettes were produced using a one-to-one real time cassette transfer from the original master tapes. No equalization was used during the duplication process. The original cassette master was then transferred, using state of the art equipment, onto high bias BASF Chromium Dioxide tapes for maximum frequency response and minimal background noise. '

 

Here's a link to the interview with Gregg Schnitzer from which the "Dark Side of the Moon" comments were taken. It's rather long, but very interesting. As Mr. Schnitzer headed MFSL's cassette division, there's a lot of commentary on that subject.

http://www.aurealm.com/violet.htm

 

This doesn't address what format the cassette master is. I believe it was 16/44.1 pcm digital for the publicly available stock copies (using what kind of machine, I'm not sure). Anyone who knows for sure, please chime in!

I can't imagine any record company in their right mind allowing anyone to use their master tape as a cassette production tape, running it dozens and dozens of times just to produce a few hundred tapes? Anyone who thinks the stock MFSL cassettes are direct dupes from master tapes is probably mistaken.

 

Can't Delete???

 

Just changing cassette "program" to cassette "division"...sounded better!

 

Yeah, I coulnd't delete posts either.

 

Gotcha...thought you were talking about MY edit!

 

Oh certainly not! Thanks for the link. Some good stuff there.

 

You obviously haven't visited eBay recently

Sellers will claim anything.

 

Maybe I read the interview too quickly, but I thought I saw that the cassettes were duplicated from a digital master that had been made from the original master.

On another note, I always had serious doubts whether MFSL got the actual original aster tapes for ALL of their albums. (Did EMI really let them take the Beatles' masters out of Abbey Road?) And I have even more doubts about whether they got that master back over and over for all the recuts and reissues!

Gardo

 

What's with the other 1%

Could that be "Who's Next" & "Live At Leeds"? Were there others??

I just remembered "Kinks / Kinda Kinks". Ouch....

 

Those, Tommy, probably Quad and Who Are You as well.