Best System for Pink Floyd

a few points;

-the ideal Pink Floyd system must do scale and space very well.

-you must have a great tt to be able to hear everything that Roger Waters 'Amused to Death' original pressing tells you. much of the out of phase 'Q' sound information info is lost on less than SOTA tt's. also the UHQR of DSOTM is pretty damn good.

-it does not hurt to have a great reel to reel machine to play 15ips 1/4" master dubs of 'Wish You Were Here' and 'DSOTM'.

--your room needs lots of deep bass capability and be coherent on peaks for 'Fearless' from Meddle to sound ideal.

i like my room/system for all those attributes including the appropriate software. i know there are other issues but those are important.

I think Samuel and Sonicbeauty have pretty much nailed the answer with the reference SACD 5.1 surround system, and headphones answers.

well; i'm a big SACD fan (i own about 1000 of them), a couple of years ago i did convert my 2-channel room to multi-channel (including a pair of f113 Fathoms) using SACD multi-channel as the source. one motivation was DSOTM 5.1. short answer; i ended up preferring my UHQR Lp of DSOTM to the 5.1. in fact; i also preferred the Allan Parson's Quad mix on DTS redbook to the Guthrie's 5.1 SACD mix. the SACD has more refinement but the Allan Parson's Quad mix has things in better balance.

a year later after getting into RTR and adding more tt's i removed multi-channel from my room.

then i heard the 15ips 1/4" master tape dub of DSOTM on the Studer.

game, set, match!

maybe someone someplace has a 1" 4-channel master tape of Parson's quad mix; that would likely be the ultimate 'holy grail' DSOTM if one had the proper RTR deck and quad system to play it on.

i have no comment on headphones.

Tvad,

yes; i've heard Pink Floyd thru headphones, although just lowly Sennheiser HD-580's. there are aspects of the sound which are unique to headphones, but a whole part of the experience is missing. on many Pink Floyd albums headphones do give you a unique 'around and thru the head' soundstage....my room gets most of that and expands the sense of space.

i respect headphone enthusiast's love of the strenghts of headphone listening. i've listened to SOTA headphones at audio shows.....and they do reveal low level information that is very enjoyable. OTOH it is not the physical experience that Pink Floyd, at warp 9, can be experienced in my room. it's cannot be a collective experience, you don't feel 4 15" subwoofers moving air, there is not the 'washing' over you with sound.

my room is designed so i don't need headphones. i do use them for finding spots on the reel to reel tapes while others are listening to other media in my room.

i would agree that headphones are, by nature, immersive and 'other-worldly'. Pink Floyd music is most definitely not meant to be 'conventional....and does compliment the headphone perspective on music. some of the 'stuff' Pink Floyd puts into the mix can be much more easily percieved on good headphones than on a typical high end system.

OTOH my 'conventional' system excells at doing space. my sources are particularly high resolution. i feel that i get the best parts of what a headphone can do in my system plus the best attributes of a conventional full range system. but....the combination is a hard one to pull off and not cheap. headphones, for Pink Floyd music in particular, get you lots of the picture with much less effort and dollars.