Pink Floyd
Meddle

These Nearly White Hot Stamper pressings have top-quality sound that's often surprisingly close to our White Hots, but they sell at substantial discounts to our Shootout Winners, making them a relative bargain in the world of Hot Stampers ("relative" meaning relative considering the prices we charge). We feel you get what you pay for here at Better Records, and if ever you don't agree, please feel free to return the record for a full refund, no questions asked.

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

This vintage British import has the richness, space, and the effortlessly extended top end that lets Meddle work its experimental proggy magic. With this pressing you will hear that veil upon veil has been lifted. You'll immediately become aware of aspects of the music and the recording that you hadn’t noticed when playing other, inferior copies of Meddle.

All the elements are there, right in front of you, clearly occupying their own space within the wider stage of the soundfield. Here are the startling dynamics, the deep, well-defined bass, the vocal sweetness, the open spaces -- in short, here is exactly the kind of sound that the band would bring to the recording of Dark Side of the Moon.

This album is proof that they already had it in them in 1971.

What The Best Sides Of Meddle Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1971
• 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

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Pink Floyd's Recordings

With amazing sound like this you can finally appreciate the music in all its ANALOG glory. This is music that's as fresh today as when it was recorded more than fifty years ago.

Meddle is good enough to take its place among the best sounding records Floyd or anybody else ever recorded, filled with all the analog magic that makes Pink Floyd one of the best-recorded bands of All Time. Besides The Beatles, who else even comes close?

Musically this record has really grown on us over the course of the last decade. There's not a bad cut on it, and most of them have not been played to death like most everything else by the band has. Play "Fearless" to hear Pink Floyd at their best, and I mean their best from any album.

If you're the kind of guy who gets a thrill from hearing Pink Floyd bangin' out one of their heaviest psych jams with mind-blowing sound, this copy is guaranteed to knock you out. Drop the needle on "One Of These Days" and listen to how HUGE the soundfield is -- it’s so wide and deep and three-dimensional you should have no trouble whatsoever getting lost in the music.

Like many of the Hottest Stamper pressings we sell, with a copy that sounds as good as this one the experience of listening to the album is nothing less than immersive.

What We're Listening For On Meddle

• 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, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of 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.

Size and Space

Some copies of the album just sound small -- they don't extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don't seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies -- my notes for these copies often read "BIG and BOLD" -- create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They're not brighter, they're not more aggressive, they're not hyped-up in any way, they're just bigger and clearer.

We often have to go back and downgrade the copies that we were initially impressed with in light of such a standout pressing. Who knew the recording could be that huge, spacious and three-dimensional? We sure didn't, not until we played the copy that had those qualities, and that copy might have been number 8 or 9 in the rotation.

Think about it: if you had only seven copies, you might not have ever gotten to hear a copy that sounded that open and clear. And how many even dedicated audiophiles would have more than one of two clean vintage British copies with which to do a shootout? These records are expensive and hard to come by in good shape. Believe us, we know whereof we speak.

One further point needs to be made: most of the time these very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy do what this copy can, it's an entirely different - and dare I say unforgettable -- listening experience.

Vinyl Condition

The recording has a lot of very quiet passages on both sides, especially in the intro to Echoes, so Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet a copy as we can find. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic that is a key part of the appeal of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• One Of These Days
• A Pillow Of Winds
• Fearless
• San Tropez
• Seamus

Side Two

• Echoes

AMG 4 1/2 Star Review

Atom Heart Mother, for all its glories, was an acquired taste, and Pink Floyd wisely decided to trim back its orchestral excesses for its follow-up, Meddle.

Opening with a deliberately surging "One of These Days," Meddle spends most of its time with sonic textures and elongated compositions, most notably on its epic closer, "Echoes." If there aren't pop songs in the classic sense (even on the level of the group's contributions to Ummagumma), there is a uniform tone, ranging from the pastoral "A Pillow of Winds" to "Fearless," with its insistent refrain hinting at latter-day Floyd.

Pink Floyd were nothing if not masters of texture, and Meddle is one of their greatest excursions into little details, pointing the way to the measured brilliance of Dark Side of the Moon and the entire Roger Waters era. Here, David Gilmour exerts a slightly larger influence, at least based on lead vocals, but it's not all sweetness and light -- even if its lilting rhythms are welcome, "San Tropez" feels out of place with the rest of Meddle.

Still, the album is one of the Floyd's most consistent explorations of mood, especially from their time at Harvest, and it stands as the strongest record they released between Syd's departure and Dark Side.