My Morning Jacket – The Waterfall II

Great set of songs, nicely recorded mixed and mastered. However, surface noise....?....Yep. Sounds exactly like someone is nervously, constantly crumbling a potato chip bag on an additional track that I’m pretty sure MMJ was unaware of during the sessions. Skip this colored version. Maybe the clear?

My copy looks and sounds amazing. Glad I was able to get this.

I can see why everyone jumped to unhappy conclusions about this release. The first impression is the color of the vinyl and it's true that the color is way off from what was advertised (mine is 95% dark orange with 5% dark blue swirls). I don't mind what it looks like if it sounds good, but like others have mentioned, mine sounded muddy on first listen. With some minor EQ adjustments (not that it should require this), I think it sounds pretty good now. I don't have the surface noise to the degree that others described, but the first 20 seconds or so of side B do have a bit of noise. Overall, it's fine. That's as high a compliment as I will give. Still a shame to reward ATO's poor quality control. Aesthetics are part of the experience and that's a clear miss on this one.

Was very hesitant to pick up a copy after seeing reviews but mine is a very nice water effect. 80% orange and 20% greenish blue.

Like most people, I think I got a sub-par pressing. It just sounds flat, and maybe I'm an idiot, but the zoetrope labels aren't working for me. Tried 33 1/3 and 45 RPM, no difference. Maybe the sound can be fixed with a good ultrasonic clean (fingers crossed), but otherwise, I'm content with my purchase. The color isn't as bad as people say, it looks better if you hold the record up to a source of light, and then you can see the green and red.

I guess I am part of the lucky. Vinyl sound as beautiful as it looks 🤩

Flat, muddy, rolled-off, no dynamic range, poor pressing sonically, sounds like it was mastered from a MP3 file.
Shame as this is a pretty good MMJ album.

Apparently I'm lucky, audiowise. Not too noisy at all, pretty dynamic sound. A nice addition to the the Spotify-copy, I'd say.

The color is a bit off, though. It's a very dark shade of green and there's nearly no orange or blue at all.

I've gone through several returns and at this point I'm settling on one that is relatively close to the advertised green/orange mix (more-so greenish blue with a little red) and sounds half decent in terms of noise. I've had a brown one, a blue one, and one very close to advertised colors but with a warp and horrible clicks/pops. They all have been consistent though with some level of noise, my current one still isn't very good at all. I've also wet cleaned and still had persistent noise. It's very unfortunate because I adore this band and this album and I'm really disappointed in the vinyl pressing for multiple reasons, including a very lacking dynamic range.

I guess I got fairly lucky considering some of the QC issues seen in this thread. It's certainly not the cleanest record I own - far from it. Lot of light clicks throughout, lack of dynamic range and fairly muddy through several tracks. The only tracks that really come close to being of the quality I'd expect are "spinning my wheels" and "wasted" - though they're not quite there. I really have to blast light on it to get it to even closely resemble the color advertised - but that's a minor consideration. I'm always hesitant with colored vinyl but expected more out of MMJ. Colortest did an awful job - can't believe I waited til TODAY to get this after preordering the day it went on sale.