Release History
Originally simply called The Alan Parsons Project, the album was successful enough to achieve gold status. The identity of The Alan Parsons Project as a group was cemented on the second album, I Robot, in 1977.
The original version of the album was available for several years on vinyl and cassette, but was not immediately available on CD.
In 1987, Parsons completely remixed the album, including additional guitar passages and narration (by Orson Welles) as well as updating the production style to include heavy reverb and the gated reverb snare drum sound, which was popular in the 1980s. The CD notes that Welles never met Parsons or Eric Woolfson, but sent a tape to them of the performance shortly after the album was manufactured in 1976.
The first passage narrated by Welles on the 1987 remix (which comes before the first track, "A Dream Within a Dream") is sourced from an obscure nonfiction piece by Poe - No XVI of his Marginalia (from 1845 to 1849 Edgar Allan Poe titled some of his reflections and fragmentary material "Marginalia.") The second passage Welles reads (which comes before "The Fall of the House of Usher" (Prelude), seems to be a partial paraphrase or composite from nonfiction by Poe, chiefly from a collection of poems titled "Poems of Youth" by Poe (contained in "Introduction to Poems – 1831" in a section titled "Letter to Mr. B-----------"; the "Shadows of shadows passing" part of the quote comes from the Marginalia.
In 1994 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MFSL) released the original 1976 version on CD (UDCD-606), making the original available digitally for the first time.
In 2007, a Deluxe Edition released by Universal Music included both the 1976 and the 1987 versions remastered by Alan Parsons during 2006 with eight additional bonus tracks.
Read more about this topic: Tales Of Mystery And Imagination
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