HiRez Poll Pink Floyd - WISH YOU WERE HERE [Blu-Ray Audio]

So the clicky blu-rays are still out there in new old stock, but the replacements are no longer available...

So I'm listening to the quad mix for the first time. Welcome To The Machine is intense!

I'm liking Guthrie's mix too: better than I was expecting.

I'm veering between 9 and 10. I really like both mixes a lot and, as with Rumours, this isn't an album I'd naturally lean to to play often (despite having the stereo mix on vinyl) but the surround mixes are both very good and draw me into the material. The sound is nice although my blu-ray had the clicks at the end, but they're not dreadful. It's potentially a very expensive box to get the blu-ray. The video material is of no major interest to me at present, although during the Storm clip when I saw the guy on the jetty throw his scarf in the water I was hoping to see him throw some marbles and beer mats too. I would have liked the second CD's material to be on the blu-ray too.

not a big Guthrie fan..I always preferred the Brian Humphries' Quad mix....too bad they edited his mix on the BD...

Revisited this disc today, including both surround mixes. The disc itself is definitely still a '10' as it has both the Guthrie 5.1 mix and the Humphries 4.0 mix in high-res, along with a couple of cool video extras (most of them also in 5.1)

But how do the mixes compare to each other? I give a slight edge to the Guthrie mix (3/5), while the Humphries mix is 2/5.
"Shine on You Crazy Diamond" overall is better on the Quad mix, while the other songs sound better on the 5.1 mix.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
I'll try to do the same very soon with "Dark Side of the Moon" as there are some really intense opinions on both mixes!

Yes, I liked both the WYWH surround mixes, whereas I was disappointed with both DSOTM surround mixes in general (although there are some great passages.)

kap'n krunch said:

not a big Guthrie fan..I always preferred the Brian Humphries' Quad mix....too bad they edited his mix on the BD...

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Does anyone know what they edited the mix? It made zero sense to me.

drphibes said:

Does anyone know what they edited the mix? It made zero sense to me.

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I remember something about it not synching with the Stereo layer...

Dark Side doesn't synch across all the mixes, so I don't see the issue. Wasn't it just seen as an error on the U.S. quad release? Isn't the UK quad as is on the blu-ray?

kap'n krunch said:

I remember something about it not synching with the Stereo layer...

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...The idea being that if you switched between layers, it was important to be in the same place in the song?

is that an technical requirement, meaning the playback will break or something will go blooey if the layers don't synch, or a stylistic decision?

I know nothing about authoring, mastering, etc.

drphibes said:

...The idea being that if you switched between layers, it was important to be in the same place in the song?

is that an technical requirement, meaning the playback will break or something will go blooey if the layers don't synch, or a stylistic decision?

I know nothing about authoring, mastering, etc.

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It all depends on the format. AFAIK, for SACDs, the 3 layers are completely independent of each other, so you can have a different number of tracks with different running times, and it won't affect the other layers.
For DVD-A, in order to have MLP Surround & MLP Stereo streams in the same title/playlist, the track number and track times have to be identical.
Finally, for DVD-V and Blu-Ray, all audio streams in a title share the same chapter breaks, so it makes sense to try and have each stream line up as close as possible so that way it works with the chapter breaks.

I've heard both mixes, but I recently listened critically and attentively to 'side one' of Guthrie's and the old quad mix one after the other. Neither really works for me. For example, neither one nailed 'Welcome to the Machine', which I would think any remixer with half a brain could get 'right'. Guess I was wrong. Really disappointing, what a missed opportunity (twice) . Sticking with the stereo mix.

ssully said:

I've heard both mixes, but I recently listened critically and attentively to 'side one' of Guthrie's and the old quad mix one after the other. Neither really works for me. For example, neither one nailed 'Welcome to the Machine', which I would think any remixer with half a brain could get 'right'. Guess I was wrong. Really disappointing, what a missed opportunity (twice) . Sticking with the stereo mix.

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Don't agree with this at all. The quad mix is great. I do however think a proper remaster could improve upon the sound of the bluray. An Audio Fidelity SACD for example...

So, just different EQ or compression choice would fix the quad? Doubt it. The problem is the mixing choices.

ssully said:

So, just different EQ or compression choice would fix the quad? Doubt it. The problem is the mixing choices.

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I do like Dark Side mix better but there is nothing wrong with Welcome To The Machine song mix.

In what post did I say that changing the eq or compression would magically change the mix? I think you took my words out of context on the Bowie Ziggy thread too if I am not mistaken. I guess that is just your style when someone doesn't agree with you.

himey said:

In what post did I say that changing the eq or compression would magically change the mix? I think you took my words out of context on the Bowie Ziggy thread too if I am not mistaken. I guess that is just your style when someone doesn't agree with you.

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You said 'a proper remaster could improve on the sound of the bluray'. Do you know what remastering is?

ssully said:

For example, neither one nailed 'Welcome to the Machine', which I would think any remixer with half a brain could get 'right'.

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That's interesting: I thought that track was immense in quad!

Both mixes for "Welcome to the Machine" work fine for me, but I prefer the 5.1 mix. That is probably Guthrie's best surround mix (yet) for Pink Floyd.
It's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (my favorite piece of music, ever!) that I think Guthrie could have been a little more creative in the surround department.

The only mastering change I would make to the Quad mixes for both this album and "Dark Side" would be to add some more bass to the mixes. I know that they seem really bass-light compared to the 5.1 mixes, but they also seem pretty bass-light compared to other Quad mixes that have been recently reissued, but other than that, I think they are fine just the way they are.

ssully said:

You said 'a proper remaster could improve on the sound of the bluray'. Do you know what remastering is?

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Yes. Let me try to make it simple for you. I like the quad mix of both this and DSOTM. I do think the sound quality could be improved on both of them if someone took a bit more care in the transfer over from the analog tapes to the digital format. I don't know what the condition of the tapes are considering they are approaching a half of a century old, but if they are OK, I think the sound of the bluray could be improved upon.

I realize that you don't care about that because you don't like the origional quad mix or the 5.1 remix...as I attempted to make very simple in my first post, I don't agree with your opinion. To say that James Guthrie and Alan Parsons don't have half a brain, because you don't like their mixing choices, especially since the members here have consistently voted them on top, really is more of a reflection on you and not their brains.