As an aural medium, the compact disc has the market cornered and has for decades.  Audio cassettes and 8-tracks fell (and, for the latter, fell hard) against the rise of CDs and their pristine digital quality.  CDs paved the way for DVDs to do the same to VHS tapes.  CDs are generally inexpensive (depends on where you buy them and what you’re buying) and are easy to transport.  But, most of all, aside from the fact that pretty much every CD was recorded in a different volume, CD-quality sound stood as the affordable, home-theater benchmark for many years.  One of the few albums people ascribe as the best for testing home-theater sound systems with was, you guessed it, The Dark Side of the Moon.

In 2003, with newer yet less appreciated technologies like Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio on the way to introduce people who had only heard popular music in stereophonic (2.0) sound to quadraphonic or surround (4.0/4.1/5.1) sound, Pink Floyd’s most popular album was released on a “flipper” SACD Hybrid.  (To give you an idea of why I got excited about beyond-stereo music, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral was released as a DualDisc CD/DVD-Audio a couple years back and sounded incredible with the different effects and tracks coming from specific speakers and not just from the left or right.)  This was a great event with one exception: Super Audio CDs can only be heard on specific equipment, designed to play them back (like trying to play a DVD on a CD player, it just doesn’t work).  Plus, SACDs are more expensive and are harder to come across than regular CDs (you’ll be lucky if you can find specific sections for either at Best Buy, Circuit City or even some stores specific for music).  Similarly, SACDs are difficult, if not impossible, to rip.

Thankfully, someone awesome decided to make a DVD-Audio of the 4.0 DSotM available on the Internet as a bootleg, and I now have it.  Whoever did that is my buddy.