Tool (2) ‎– Lateralus

Mine sounds great and happy to own it.
I'll buy anything from TOOL.

got mine almost a year ago and have had similar issues as others with quality. listened to it again the other day and was reminded at how terrible the audio quality is, so decided to leave a review.

Lateralus is probably my favorite Tool record, so it was kinda disappointing how bad the press is.

the good: discs and bifold are beautiful. i love the designs and if nothing else its a nice display piece and addition to a collection.

the bad: crackles and pops on every side, some areas worse than others (its been a consistent bad time on my copy so i cant say if any one track has worse sound than another; id have to sit down again and listen to it to make notes.) i dont have the highest quality equipment, its mid range from the 70s with a newer audio technica cartage on it, but its without a doubt the worst sounding vinyl in my collection. i hear picture discs are notoriously lesser quality audio, but this seems to be an extreme case. there also appears to be some visible defects in the designs. makes cleaning them annoying because there are just permanent specs on the surface and you never really know if its dust or part of the press.

conclusion: buy for your collection and occasional listening if for some reason you want to listen to Lateralus on vinyl vs a cleaner format, but its definitely not something id recommend as a primary source of listening.

I had a copy of this from a local record store. Was so disappointed by it that I traded it back for something else. It skipped on "The Grudge", and other points of the record. It's a nice collector's item, but I don't collect records to look at them; I collect them to listen to them, and this one doesn't sound good. I would have preferred a non-picture disc. Hope Tool wises up and releases their entire discography properly on vinyl.

Doesn't matter which coppy of this release you will take into a consideration - all of them seems to have sound issues here and there. Even the most neat copies, cleared and well stored are having more or less issues in various places of songs (meaning noise, cracking etc.) I have a copy which has only 3 places with problems, and one of them sometimes occur and sometimes it wont (I'm talking about "A3 The Patient, where sometimes it skips a 20-30 seconds, sometimes it doesn't). A lot of noise and cracking between Reflection and Triad seems to be present in every release and I'm beggining to thinking that this is the last vinyl release of any of album done by TOOL because this LP has been done just very badly and they are afraid of similar situation. But this is just my thinking. Nevertheless - I'm happy with having this LP because I'm a lucky guy - 3 problems with this vinyl (and 1 not always occur) out of many more that people tend to have is like winning in a lottery.

Just another terrible review for this. Mine has tons of surface noise. I know...it's a picture disc release. Sounds ok when it's full band but in the soft dynamics it ruins the listening. I've only seen few that say it sounds great so looks like it'll just be a collectors item for me. Here's hoping they release this album properly for vinyl.

I just received this picture disc via Amazon (brand new) for what I thought was a great price. I was expecting some surface noise but it skips terribly on side 2 at Parabol. Side 1 sounds pretty damn good and disk 2 has very little noise- not sure what to do. Amazon will replace it but looking at all the comments it sounds like pot luck. I'm frustrated that Tool would OK such a poor picture disc.

Does this record have the signatures of the band mates.. like the 250-300.. or is it before or after?