Roxy Music’s Avalon to be released on SDE exclusive blu-ray

Quick pre-order at the SDE shop

Roxy Music’s classic 1982 album, Avalon, will be the next release in the SDE Surround Series of blu-ray audios with Dolby Atmos mixes.

The band’s swan song, Avalon was recorded between 1981 and 1982 at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, and features the Roxy Music’s final UK top 10 UK single, ‘More Than This‘. Title track ‘Avalon‘ was a top 20 single a few months later and the final single from the album was ‘Take a Chance With Me‘ which reached #26. Avalon topped the UK album charts for three consecutive weeks and sold a million copies in America. 

When Bob Clearmountain heard that Avalon was coming out on blu-ray, he threw his arms up and said, ‘fantastic!, because at least people get to hear it in its true quality’.

Rhett Davies, Avalon co-producer

The blu-ray audio – #36 in the ongoing SDE Suround Series

– will feature the Grammy-nominated Dolby Atmos Mix created by Bob Clearmountain, the 5.1 Surround Sound Mix from the now very-hard-to-get-hold-of Super Audio CD (SACD) released in 2003 (also by Bob Clearmountain) and the original 1982 stereo mix.

Audio streams on the Avalon SDE exclusive blu-ray:

• Avalon 2024 Dolby Atmos Mix (48/24)
• Avalon 2003 DTS-HD 5.1 Mix (96/24)
• Avalon 1982 Original Stereo Mix (96/24)

The new Atmos Mix was overseen by Bryan Ferry and the album’s co-producer Rhett Davies and approved by Roxy Music. The blu-ray comes packaged in the same deluxe hardcover mediabook packaging used for the Bryan Ferry Retrospective and Thompson Twins Into The Gap releases. As ever, Avalon ships with a free, collectible SDE Surround Series slipcase.

The old 5.1 mix of Avalon is widely regarded by connoisseurs as one of the best surround mixes of a pop-rock ever created and now its architect, Bob Clearmountain, has gone one step further with an incredibly immersive Dolby Atmos Mix that has been available on streaming for a few months. However, there’s no comparison to the physical version, underlined by what Rhett Davies told me when I spoke to him and Bryan Ferry recently, “When Bob Clearmountain heard that Avalon was coming out on blu-ray, he threw his arms up and said, ‘fantastic!, because at least people get to hear it in its true quality”. What Bob is referring to here is the compression and difference in bandwidth. The Dolby Atmos version on a Blu-ray is encoded in Dolby TrueHD Atmos and has a bit rate 10 times higher (up to 8000 kbits/s) compared to streaming’s Dolby Digital Plus (768 kbits/s). It’s worth also noting that the multi-track tapes for the ‘India’ were located so it’s not an upmix in Atmos as it was on the 5.1 mix.

The Immersive Audio Album website, in a review of the new Avalon Atmos Mix, said “Going up against arguably one of the best-ever 5.1 remixes of a classic album is an unenviable task, but Clearmountain and Davies have amazingly managed to outdo their past work”. 

The Avalon blu-ray is a limited edition and has a 14 day pre-order window, which closes on Friday 21 February 2025. Availability cannot be guaranteed after that date. The blu-ray is available only via the SDE shop. You can pre-order via the shop website using this link or by using the buttons below.

This Avalon blu-ray is released on 9 May 2025 via UMR.

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