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Sorting out the various versions of the classic Pink Floyd album on the market
Record collectors. They're a funny lot, really. Just ask yourself, for example, how many times you have replaced a particular disc in your collection. Once? Twice? Five times?
Any other collector, a philatelist or numismatist, for instance, might go a lifetime without ever again touching a particular favorite in their album... maybe upgrading if a better conditioned example comes along, but otherwise content in the knowledge that the space is filled, the gap is plugged, and it doesn't matter how many brightly colored replicas come along, their original acquisition remains inviolate.
Record collectors, on the other hand.... You buy an album in 1973. A couple of years later you upgrade your sound system to quadraphonic, in the days when that was considered the wave of the future. So, you buy the album again. Quad withers and dies, and your old stereo copy is looking a little worn. You pick up a new copy, and, somewhere around the late 1970s, you maybe grab the picture disc as well, just because it looks so nifty.
The mid-1980s arrive, bearing with them, CD. Out with the old, in with the new. Except the CD doesn't sound half as good, so you pick up the latest vinyl repressing, then upgrade the CD when the remaster arrives.
Another copy arrives as part of a box set, another turns up in SACD. An anniversary edition promises the best sound quality ever, and a DVD-Audio projects pretty images across your widescreen TV... a picture disc with a superiority complex! And so on and so forth until the fateful day when you're browsing through a Pink Floyd discography, and you realize, to your horror, that you have now owned no less than a dozen different versions of Dark Side Of The Moon, and not one of them sounds as vital as the first one you ever purchased, all those decades before. But, whereas a stamp or coin collector would still have his copy filed neatly away, yours went to the used store long ago.
Thirty-five years is a long time in the life of a gramophone record, which is one reason why the above analogy doesn't work....