Animals: Dolby Edition WARNER MUSIC
Prog legends’ ‘punkest’ record gets the Dolby Atmos Blu-ray treatment.
Pink Floyd have always been looking for ways to make listening more imitative of how the human brain perceives sound. In 1967, they became the first group to present their music live with a custom-built quadraphonic speaker system and a panning control device they nicknamed the Azimuth Coordinator. More recently, there has been a plethora of spatial audio editions of The Dark Side Of The Moon to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
The scuffle for repackaged Animals products has been less frenzied. It’s the black sheep of their 70s era, a challenging, sometimes confrontational album that nevertheless sold four million copies. Given a Dolby Atmos 5.1 surround sound remix by James Guthrie in 2018, that mix has made it to Blu-ray six years later, with added high resolution stereo and 5.1 mixes and the 1977 original stereo mix.
During the listening session Prog is invited to, we count nine speakers around the room with six on the ceiling (such optimal listening conditions aren’t essential –it can still be listened to on Dolby Atmos headphones, soundbars or home speaker set-ups). Opener Pigs On The Wing, with Roger Waters’ voice accompanied by a single acoustic guitar, is not what spatial sound was designed for, though the contrast with the oncoming Dogs serves to highlight the flatness of stereo and the panoramic density of Atmos. David Gilmour’s overdubbed duelling guitars arrive and they become conversational as they reverberate on either side of the room, and then the
