What are your favorite volumes of Pink Floyd's Early Years box set

pglbook

I could not afford the Pink Floyd Early Years big box but am looking to get some of the individual Early Years volumes and am curious what ones people like the best. Please recommend a few Early Years volumes to me. 1969 and 1972 look great to me but the format and description of the contents (CD, DVDs. why DVDs? audio or visual?) are confusing to me. Plus, I'd like to know which volumes have the best sound quality.

Btw, Pink Floyd just announced an upcoming Later Years box set and, being totally unfamiliar with the band's later (post-Wall) output, please let me know your thoughts on the upcoming Later Years box.

Thanks.

maingey

All I can tell you is that I found out about them during the Division Bell. The Mrs. calls me a faker at this point.

mhardy6647

I don't know any thing about the box set.
I can say that I have a lot of respect for the Pink Floyd's early, profoundly psychedelic ethos -- but I can't say I am a huge fan of most of the music from the Syd Barrett era

That said, Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a pretty remarkable, if also remarkably bizarre, album and well worth some attention.

Some of the psychotically whimsical output of Barrett is remarkable, e.g., Bike. Great song (for lack of a better word).

Arnold Layne is a great song, too -- albeit bizarre in a different way than Bike.

Later (mid-period), there were flashes of remarkableness in songs like Grantchester Meadows, Several Species of Small Furry Animals... (too lazy to type the whole title) and San Tropez.

.. and then they turned into the arena/dinosaur/political commentary juggernaut that they would become

mhardy6647

Oh, and I forgot one of my very favorites -- Fearless. I played this, loud, to psych myself up before my thesis defense in 1986.

Fearlessly the idiot faced the crowd
Smiling
...

I guess it worked -- I passed.

pglbook

mhardy6647 wrote: »

I don't know any thing about the box set.
I can say that I have a lot of respect for the Pink Floyd's early, profoundly psychedelic ethos -- but I can't say I am a huge fan of most of the music from the Syd Barrett era

That said, Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a pretty remarkable, if also remarkably bizarre, album and well worth some attention.

Some of the psychotically whimsical output of Barrett is remarkable, e.g., Bike. Great song (for lack of a better word).

Arnold Layne is a great song, too -- albeit bizarre in a different way than Bike.

Later (mid-period), there were flashes of remarkableness in songs like Grantchester Meadows, Several Species of Small Furry Animals... (too lazy to type the whole title) and San Tropez.

.. and then they turned into the arena/dinosaur/political commentary juggernaut that they would become

Thanks, I also like the early psychedelic era of Pink Floyd and have some of their early albums on lp and CD. I also have the Shine On box set, which is a great collection (9 CDs, iirc).

I was interested in info on The Early Years box because I have not come across many reviews about contents and sound quality in that collection. I believe The Early Years box collects a lot of demos and rarities. It is not just a reissue of the albums.

I was also wondering about DVD-A. The volumes on The Early Years box contain both CDs and DVDs. I feel like I should know what an audio DVD is but I do not. Would I have to play the DVD-A in a DVD player or a computer? I recently bought a new Jethro Tull box set (Heavy Horses 40th Anniv. New Shoes Edition) and that has 3 CDs and 2 DVD-A discs and I do not know what to do with the DVD-A discs as I no longer have a DVD player hooked up. Btw, those new Jethro Tull boxes (w/the Steve Wilson remixes) are amazing, both in terms of sound quality and production; a stellar example of what a box set should be. I just wish I knew what to do with the DVD-A discs, ha.

mhardy6647

DVD-A was a hi-res format like, but incompatible with, Sony's SACD.
DVD-A "lost" the format war -- not sure how many DVD-A compatible players exist; I am sure there are listings of them somewhere in cyberspace.

aprazer402

This site may help in search for a DVD-Audio player.
http://dvd-a.net/universal_blu-ray_disc_players.html

SIHAB

any box with quad mixes are interesting to me. Early years boxes.
I think all the boxes sound good in keeping w/ the source.

1965-67; many people could pass on this box. It is nice to have
Vegetable Man and Scream thy Last Scream in non-bootleg form.
The Stockholm concert is a disappointment as the vocals are all but missing.
I finally took the time to listen to the John Latham stuff. Non-essential.

1968; Again, it is nice to hear 'Point Me at the Sky' in non-bootleg form.
The non-LP singles are fun as well as the BBC stuff. I lot of repetition.

1969; bonus tracks from the 'More' soundtrack that were used in the film but not on record, plus non-album tracks like the early version of Embryo from the Harvest sampler 'Picnic'. I like some of the 'More' stuff very much and would buy it for that -- the full
'The Man/ The Journey'.

1970; AHM was a get for the quad mix
1971; Meddle was a get for the quad mix of echoes.
1972; 'Live At Pompeii' film, edited to new 5.1 audio mixes and is weird to old timers

I just noticed that the LATER years boxes are due out November 29.

pglbook

mhardy6647 wrote: »

DVD-A was a hi-res format like, but incompatible with, Sony's SACD.
DVD-A "lost" the format war -- not sure how many DVD-A compatible players exist; I am sure there are listings of them somewhere in cyberspace.

Thanks. Why would these recent box sets (Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull) include DVD-A discs if there are very few options available to play the discs? Seems rather strange to me.

pglbook

SIHAB wrote: »

any box with quad mixes are interesting to me. Early years boxes.
I think all the boxes sound good in keeping w/ the source.

1965-67; many people could pass on this box. It is nice to have
Vegetable Man and Scream thy Last Scream in non-bootleg form.
The Stockholm concert is a disappointment as the vocals are all but missing.
I finally took the time to listen to the John Latham stuff. Non-essential.

1968; Again, it is nice to hear 'Point Me at the Sky' in non-bootleg form.
The non-LP singles are fun as well as the BBC stuff. I lot of repetition.

1969; bonus tracks from the 'More' soundtrack that were used in the film but not on record, plus non-album tracks like the early version of Embryo from the Harvest sampler 'Picnic'. I like some of the 'More' stuff very much and would buy it for that -- the full
'The Man/ The Journey'.

1970; AHM was a get for the quad mix
1971; Meddle was a get for the quad mix of echoes.
1972; 'Live At Pompeii' film, edited to new 5.1 audio mixes and is weird to old timers

I just noticed that the LATER years boxes are due out November 29.

Great info. Thanks.

pglbook

aprazer402 wrote: »

This site may help in search for a DVD-Audio player.
http://dvd-a.net/universal_blu-ray_disc_players.html

Thanks. The DVD-A discs in the Jethro Tull box set I recently bought have the same music that is on the CDs, but in a different format (5.1 or surround or quad mix). It is definitely not enough of a reason for me to go out and get a DVD-A player. It just seems strange that some recent box sets would include a format such as DVD-A that only a limited number of consumers may be able to access.

Emlyn

DVD-A discs could be made in a standard DVD production facility so they were cost effective. There are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of DVD-A capable DVD and Blu Ray players out there although some of the new models don't have the capability to do the decoding anymore as the format is largely considered dead and there were licensing issues involved with decoding.

In the early days of DVD-A someone had to buy an expensive ($1K plus) DVD player with analog outputs to get the DVD-A tracks to play in high resolution. I know I had to. DVD-A as a format had the benefits of being cheap to manufacture and copy protected when it came out. It had drawbacks of needing a video display connection to be useful and being expensive for the consumer to use to its full capabilities. There were also far too few discs put out in the format because the original or close to original multi track tapes had to be used to master a surround sound version of an album out of something that in most cases was never intended to be in a surround sound format.

It would really make more sense to me these days though to just put multi channel tracks on a Blu Ray disc and have them encoded as PCM and/or in Dolby True HD. The Blu Ray Pure Audio format does that, but it too seems to be on the death bed. They probably did not do that with the Early Years sets because of the production lead time and when the sets came out. They caught my eye when they were put on the market, but I did not view the amount of materials as worth the price to me. If someone is a huge fan and wants everything that shows how the albums were worked on originally and performed live, they do make sense.

PSOVLSK

pglbook wrote: »

I just wish I knew what to do with the DVD-A discs, ha.

Karma...to me😁

Seriously though, I’d be interested if you wanted to sell them.

nooshinjohn

Bump

pglbook

PSOVLSK wrote: »

pglbook wrote: »

I just wish I knew what to do with the DVD-A discs, ha.

Karma...to me😁

Seriously though, I’d be interested if you wanted to sell them.

Thanks. I will hang on to them for now in case I find a way to play the DVD audio discs (I have a DVD player stored away and will have to see if that can play DVD-A discs) . But I will definitely keep you in mind if I ever decide to part with them (and, if so, it will be a karma).

SIHAB

One of the live shows is killer but I can't remember which one.
I played one box after the other! I'll polk around and see if I can
come up w/ it. ...

PSOVLSK

Any DVD should work. Give it a listen...it should sound really good.