Thompson Twins – Into The Gap

My copy is centered, flat'ish, and quiet. This remaster is highly revealing; vocal harmonizing and percussive details are especially highlighted on this pressing. The soundstage is much more full and pronounced vs previous vinyl and cd presentations I have owned. My wife was stunned and even giggled over the intro on Doctor Doctor; the 3d detail and ensuing slam was wholly unexpected.

Pro-Ject X1B + Sumiko Wellfleet / Schiit Mani 2 / Musical Fidelity M5si / Dali Oberon 7's

Beautiful pressing, very low noise floor and virtually no surface noise before my typical wet clean and run through the ultrasonic. Very wide soundstage, perfect instrument separation and sounds much better than my CD version. The packaging is nice with a wonderful write up in the liner notes. I have read that GZ Media guarantees quality based on how much is paid, this one seems like someone went for top shelf.

My copy wasn't the flattest, but thankfully played fine. This reissue sounds really good and the vinyl played through perfectly quiet. Overall, a great job was done with this.

“Massive treat for me to work on Into The Gap in Dolby Atmos. The icing on the cake being Tom Bailey visiting my studio for a listen and to make comments during the process. The original recordings sound so good and are brilliantly produced – all recorded on analogue tape at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, and transferred to digital for me to use at incredibly high resolution. I spent around a month rebuilding the album mixes from the individual parts on the multitracks, with as many of the original nuances, pan positions, effects and mix intentions retained as possible.

And then onto mixing in Atmos – my mission was to really make use of all the speaker options, including lots of action in the center, rear and overhead speakers, whilst maintaining the flow and integrity of the original stereo mixes. The music is often complex and multi-layered, so this was a perfect opportunity to hear all the lovely details and individual parts more clearly by opening up the tracks fully into the space.

Being a total synth nerd it was awesome to hear all those great analogue tones and finally figure out how they managed to make certain parts work by layering multiple patches. The solo in ‘Doctor Doctor’ for instance – split across different synths, now opened up both left to right and front to back. A really distinctive part of what made TT so big was the unique layering of backing vocals, shared between Tom, Alannah and Joe’s very different voices – and again here it was a no-brainer to allow these to have their own spaces around the listening space. All the percussion elements were recorded on separate tracks too, and these often worked a treat being placed around the room”. – David Kosten

Remasters and reissues such as this are a great way to get that Arista label off of the artwork! Especially for one of the most played albums of my childhood.

I think sounds pretty good overall. The red vinyl looks very nice too.