"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."
An unabashed analogue 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 24 March 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. It was played on a 5.1 monitoring system identical to the one Guthrie uses in his studio, consisting of five SCM150ASLs and two SCM0.1-15 subwoofers, courtesy of ATC.
(Lee Baldock)
