After the first intermission, the stage darkens to reveal a huge heartbeat pulse flickering across the giant circular screen. This, of course, triggers the beginning of The Dark Side Of The Moon's opening track "Speak To Me". After a haunting performance of "Breath" things really heat up, literally, as "On The Run" ends with a burning airplane flying across the entire length of the arena until it crashes and explodes into a giant fireball at the front corner of the stadium. Oh, it only gets better.

The famous orgasmic female vocals on "The Great Gig in the Sky" were performed stunningly by Sam Brown, but when she handed off the ending part to the other two backup singers they failed to sustain the same electricity. "Money" featured a cool soulful/blues breakdown in the middle, before ending with another phenomenal Gilmour guitar solo. The set came to an end with a dazzling light display that signaled the end of "Eclipse", which brilliantly concluded The Dark Side Of The Moon.

After a second intermission, the recorded intro to "Wish You Were Here" fills the arena, before a spotlight eventually shines on Gilmour as he fingers the opening chords to this timeless classic. It was as beautiful as I've ever heard it. This leads to what I was especially anxious to see on DVD, since it is one of my favorite songs of all time, "Comfortably Numb". The performance was plenty awesome, but the stage show now goes from merely astonishing to downright mind-blowing. During Gilmour's second guitar solo, the huge circular screen/lighting rig begins to rotate down, horizontally, over the stage, and by the end of the song the giant mirror ball that had been reflecting a dozen spotlights all over the stadium, slowly peels open like some monstrous alien spaceship — and that was just child's play compared to the light show during the finale of "Run Like Hell".

When I first saw the VHS version of Pulse sometime around 1998, I vowed not to watch it again until I had the DVD version in my hand. It deserved to be seen on DVD with 5.1 surround sound. Little did I know it would take another eight years to achieve my objective, but the Pulse DVD has been worth the wait. Two Dolby Digital 5.1 surround audio options are provided, one at 480 kbps and one at 640 kbps. David Gilmour helped with the production of these tracks, and did a remarkable job. A Dolby Digital stereo track is also included.

The booklet includes a disclaimer that the 640 Kbps track may not work on some "older" model DVD players, and this turned out to be true in my case. My four-year-old Hitachi DVD player would not play the 640 kbps track, but my cheaper, one-year-old Zenith player had no such problem. The 480 kbps track sounded excellent enough through my surround sound system, but the almost DTS quality 640 kbps track was a noticeable improvement, especially at lower volumes. The only problem I noticed with the mix was whenever the giant bass drum was struck by percussionist Dick Wallis, I thought my poor subwoofer was going to implode. It was mixed excessively loud.