(Rock) [LP][16/44] David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust - 1972, MFSL - 1983, FLAC (tracks)

Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan's glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, David Bowie reached back to the heavy rock of The Man Who Sold the World for The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Constructed as a loose concept album about an androgynous alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust, the story falls apart quickly, yet Bowie's fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread. Fleshing out the off-kilter metallic mix with fatter guitars, genuine pop songs, string sections, keyboards, and a cinematic flourish, Ziggy Stardust is a glitzy array of riffs, hooks, melodrama, and style and the logical culmination of glam. Mick Ronson plays with a maverick flair that invigorates rockers like "Suffragette City," "Moonage Daydream," and "Hang Onto Yourself," while "Lady Stardust," "Five Years," and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" have a grand sense of staged drama previously unheard of in rock & roll. And that self-conscious sense of theater is part of the reason why Ziggy Stardust sounds so foreign. Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and Ziggy Stardust — familiar in structure, but alien in performance — is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion.

- Software

Waveform editing - Cool Edit Pro
wav to flac conversion - db Power Amp

- Hardware (order of appearance denotes signal flow)

Lyra Skala moving coil phonograph cartridge
Nottingham Spacearm and phono cable on Nottingham Spacedeck
Aesthetix Rhea phono preamplifier - gain 62dB, load 2,500 ohms, phase non-inverted
Analysis Plus Crystal Oval Plus rca interconnect cables
iKey Plus analog to digital converter
Maxtor USB Hard Disk Drive

Tube information for Rhea:
First gain stage - Sovtek 12AX7LP vaccum tubes
Second and third gain stages - General Electric 12AX7WB vacuum tubes
Output Stage - Sovtek 6922 vacuum tubes

Richard Grey Power Company RGP600 alternating current power conditioner (parallel operation only)

Record cleaned with VPI 16.5 record cleaning machine with Record Research Lab record cleaning
fluids and Nitty Gritty brushes