PINK FLOYD Dark Side Of The Moon HOT STAMPER '73 Harvest SMAS 11163 1ST PRESS

$

400

Vinyl:  EX Play Graded. Sounds Excellent!  HOT STAMPER!  Has some marks that don't affect the sound quality.  Custom Harvest Labels are Clean and Bright.  This is the 1973 Harvest SMAS 11163 1ST PRESSING!  This is the audiophile acclaimed pressing, Mastered by one of the most highly renowned Engineers of All Time, Wally Traugott and Pressed at Capitol's Los Angeles, CA Pressing Plant!  Wally's Mastering brings high definition to the soundscapes that blow the other versions of DSOTM away!  Ever heard heartbeats just before the beginning of Brain Damage?  On The Run is truly frightening in its sonic menace on this Version.  Gilmour's peak solos on Time and Clare Torry's career defining vocals on Great Gig In The Sky are truly revelatory...I hear Torry say something under her breath that I've never heard before...This is THE version to have AND it's a HOT STAMPER!
HOT STAMPERS are typically among the first of a factory Pressing run.  The Master is produced from the Original Analog tapes.  The Master is utilized to make the stampers at the Pressing Plant and so, much like coins pressed at a mint, the stampers produce exceptionally highly defined copies until they've made so many that the product begins to lose the definition that the stamper originally provided.  Then, they use a new stamper.

RECIPE FOR IDENTIFYING A HOT STAMPER First:  listen to many copies of Dark Side Of The Moon, listening for a copy that has the following qualities:
The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space. The most Tube Amp Presence, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tube Amp Presence that was on the original tapes in 1973.  You can hear the hum of Gilmour's Tube Amp warmth throughout.
Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low. Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre. Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR ON A HOT STAMPER
ENERGY for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music? Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them. The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality. Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to lesser pressings. Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, together with the frequency extension further down. Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments. Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Pink Floyd's Highest Achievement!  One of the Top 5 Rock N Roll Albums of All Time!  Perhaps the Greatest Rock 'N Roll Concept Album of All Time!  The accolades go on and on but perhaps this single fact puts into perspective Pink Floyd's Opus:  it spent a Colossal 741 weeks on the Billboard charts!  That's 15 years, friends... An amazing odyssey!  The culmination of over a year's work, Dark Side Of The Moon achieves Roger Waters' examination of the psyche of Founding member, Syd Barrett in a way that speaks truth with compassion and insight and leaves just enough mystery to have us coming back again and again...The apotheosis of Gilmour's stratocaster sound, this is Pink Floyd's Finest album!  One of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time!!!  allmusic gives it 5 stars!!!

See Review Below!
In the dead wax:  Side 1:  1-11163-F-39   5   MASTERED BY CAPITOL  the * glyph ((Pressed at Capitol's Los Angeles, CA Pressing Plant))
Side 2:  SMAS-2-11163  F-57   2  the * glyph ((Pressed at Capitol's Los Angeles, CA Pressing Plant))  MASTERED BY CAPITOL  Wally ((Mastered at Capitol by Wally Traugott))

Cover: VG+ (see photos)  Gatefold.  Nice high gloss on cover.  Front, gatefold and back of cover artwork and text are rich, clear and bright, with minimal wear and a rub mark on the front cover.  Seams, corners and spine are solid and clean, with minor wear.  No splits.  There are tiny clear tape reinforcements at some of the corners (see photos).  No writing.  Spine print is crystal clear.   

Goldmine Standards.   I play grade every record that I sell on eBay as I have found you can't rate an LP accurately by just visually inspecting an album.  I wipe the dust off of every cover with clean, unscented baby wipes.  I professionally clean the vinyl.  (I also operate a Vinyl Record Cleaning business for your dusty/dirty records--if interested, send me a message).

The Dark Side of the Moon Review

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

By condensing the sonic explorations of Meddle to actual songs and adding a lush, immaculate production to their trippiest instrumental sections, Pink Floyd inadvertently designed their commercial breakthrough with Dark Side of the Moon. The primary revelation of Dark Side of the Moon is what a little focus does for the band. Roger Waters wrote a series of songs about mundane, everyday details which aren't that impressive by themselves, but when given the sonic backdrop of Floyd's slow, atmospheric soundscapes and carefully placed sound effects, they achieve an emotional resonance. But what gives the album true power is the subtly textured music, which evolves from ponderous, neo-psychedelic art rock to jazz fusion and blues-rock before turning back to psychedelia. It's dense with detail, but leisurely paced, creating its own dark, haunting world. Pink Floyd may have better albums than Dark Side of the Moon, but no other record defines them quite as well as this one.