How the Mitsubishi X-800 digital multitrack transformed Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason

For A Momentary Lapse of Reason, producer Bob Ezrin and engineer Andy Jackson used a Mitsubishi X-800 32-track digital multitrack recorder — the first time Pink Floyd worked fully in the digital domain. The Mitsubishi machine allowed them to cut, splice, and rearrange recordings with surgical precision, something almost impossible with analog tape. You could punch in a single note without degrading the surrounding audio, and you didn’t lose generation quality with each bounce.

The change from analog was huge. On older Floyd records, you had to commit to a mix or risk tape hiss and generational loss when layering tracks. The Mitsubishi gave them a clean, noise-free canvas with 32 tracks — enough to stack all of David Gilmour’s guitar overdubs, the hired session players, and the endless keyboard layers without worrying about running out of space or adding noise. Ezrin and Jackson still mixed to ¼-inch analog tape afterward to warm things up, but the recording process itself became far more surgical and less about happy accidents. The album sounds cleaner and more polished than The Wall or The Final Cut — and that digital crispness is a big reason why.