#60: Heaven 17 / The Luxury Gap SDE exclusive blu-ray audio

"The best it has ever sounded" -  Martyn Ware

Heaven 17's 1983 album The Luxury Gap is now available to pre-order on SDE exclusive blu-ray order, newly remixed in Dolby Atmos, 5.1 and stereo by David Kosten.

One of the best-selling albums of 1983 The Luxury Gap features the band's defining hit single 'Temptation' along with 'Let Me Go', 'Come Live With Me' and 'Crushed by the Wheels of Industry'.

In newly commissioned sleeve notes for this edition, The Guardian's head rock and pop critic, Alexis Petridis, says: "Everything on The Luxury Gap was irresistible. It was the kind of album where every track sounds like a hit single... An album that skilfully synthesized the two distinct elements of its predecessor – electronics and funk – into a sound that was simultaneously modern but warm, a firm underlining of Heaven 17’s skill as pop craftsmen". 

David Kosten, who in recent times has impressed immersive audio fans with stunning Atmos Mixes of Propaganda's A Secret Wish, Fine Young Cannibals' The Raw and the Cooked and Thompson Twins' Into The Gap has worked his magic on The Luxury Gap, rebuilding the album in stereo from the original analogue multi-track tapes and then creating massively immersive Dolby Atmos and 5.1 Surround Mixes.

David's new stereo mix is also fantastically dynamic and unlimited.

Martyn Ware, whose interest in immersive audio goes back 20 years, attended approval sessions in person at Kosten's West London studio was bowled over, saying it was "beautiful work" and as with Penthouse and Pavement he exclaimed that the album, in Atmos, was "the best it has ever sounded".