Pink Floyd
Wish You Were Here

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.

The sound of this very special import pressing is huge, open, and spacious like nothing you have ever heard.  It's also exceptionally transparent, with substantial amounts of depth and three-dimensionality.

There is a huge room around the drums that we guarantee you have never heard sound as big and real as it does on this very record.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

Here is the size, energy, and presence to bring the music out of the speakers and right into your listening room!

What The Best Sides Of Wish You Were Here 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 1975
• 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.

Everything We Want From Pink Floyd

This is the perfect example of everything we look for in a recording here at Better Records: it's dynamic, present, transparent, rich, full-bodied, super low-distortion, sweet -- good copies of this record have exactly what we audiophiles need to make us forget what our stereos are doing and focus instead on what the musicians are doing.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the album, Pink Floyd managed to record one of the most amazing sounding records in the history of rock music. The song "Wish You Were Here" starts out with radio noise and other sound effects, then suddenly an acoustic guitar appears, floating in the middle of your living room between the speakers, clear as a bell and as real as you have ever heard. It's obviously an effect, but for we audiophiles it's pure ear candy.

On a copy like this one, it's MAGICAL.

What We're Listening For On Wish You Were Here

• 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 -- Brian Humphries in this case -- would have 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.

A Word About Surface Noise

It is almost impossible to find copies of this album that play better than Mint Minus Minus. There are plenty of quiet passages in the music that expose even minor surface noises, which means there's always at least something to be heard under the music somewhere.

The moderate and louder sections of the music on a Mint Minus Minus copy will always play well, but those of you who are picky about quiet surfaces (or have noisy cartridges) are advised that even our Mint Minus Minus pressings are going to have some ticky passages.

Of course your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed, as it is on every record we sell, no questions asked.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (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 other 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 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.

Track Commentary

The Tracklist tab above will take you to a select song breakdown for each side, with plenty of What To Listen For Advice.

Other records with individual track breakdowns and plenty of What To Listen For advice can be found here.

A Must Own Rock Record

This Demo Disc quality recording should be part of any serious Rock Collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Pts. 1-5

• Right from the dynamic intro you can tell this is going to be a wild ride. David Gilmour's haunting guitar line that comes cutting from out of the abyss should be warm with tons of room for his phasers to do their phasing.

  After the band comes in and the vocals begin (listen for the man chuckling in the left channel) you should pay attention to the balance of the mix. Most copies tend to be very midrangy which can make the guitars aggressive and harsh, often times taking emphasis away from the vocals. The good copies have lots of transparency and allow everything to sit in their respectively places. This is probably most noticeable during the saxophone solo.

  The tenor that starts off this section needs to be breathy, full-bodied, and sitting delicately in the center of your speakers. It does NOT need be be honky and hard sounding without any top extension. As the solo slowly crescendos, notice the guitar line spread across the soundstage that actually bookends the saxophone. The more dynamic copies really let you hear the intricacy and delicacy of his picking that foreshadows the time signature shift about to come.

  When the time does change to 6/4, the saxophone player changes to alto, totally changing the sound of the solo! You can clearly hear on the better copies that he is further away from the mike than during the previous section, but if you listen closely, it sounds as though he is moving on and off axis. Whether this is part of his mike technique or him just dancin' and groovin' to the music, we may never know. I certainly hope for the latter.

• Welcome to the Machine

Side Two

• Have a Cigar
• Wish You Were Here
• Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Pts. 6-9

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

Pink Floyd followed the commercial breakthrough of Dark Side of the Moon with Wish You Were Here, a loose concept album about and dedicated to their founding member Syd Barrett. The record unfolds gradually, as the jazzy textures of "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" reveal its melodic motif, and in its leisurely pace, the album shows itself to be a warmer record than its predecessor.

Musically, it's arguably even more impressive, showcasing the group's interplay and David Gilmour's solos in particular. And while it's short on actual songs, the long, winding soundscapes are constantly enthralling.