Porcupine Tree – In Absentia

This vinyl remaster sounds great. Unfortunately, like many other people who bought this pressing, it came extremely dirty. Due to the amount of dust, and the sleeves scratching up the records, I would recommend going for the Tonefloat press if you can afford it (they did a great job with my copy of The Incident). Overall, it's a great pressing hindered by the factory's carelessness.

As the guy everyone knows with a turntable and records, people usually come to me with LPs to listen to, clean and advice.

My mate purchased this, and I don't know the album or how it's meant to sound so my review will be subjective to the quality of the pressing and media.

I will say that this sounds amazing, we have almost no/if not no surface noise on his copy, it sounds full and seems to sound very good. I cannot really fault this and would reccomend to buy this if you're looking for this album. I ran out of distilled water, so I can only assume it would be better after a clean since we had a few small clicks but nothing major at all.

The only issues that I had (since I was present for the opening) were the packaging was weird in the sense that the sleeves were just sitting in the middle of the Gatefold cover and the sleeves themselves are paper. I'd highly suggest to clean the LPs and get some plastic inner sleeves.

My setup - for reference

Telefunken CS-10
Converted to RCA outputs
Ortofon 2M Blue
Marantz SR-6011
Mordaunt Short Carnival 8
Audioengine S8

Mine is a 180g copy purchased early 2019.

It is dynamic with a wide dynamic range, and highly detailed. The discs are dead flat. Really cannot praise this enough.

The mastering is very good and a marked improvement over the original release and the dull streaming compressed version. But... my vinyl copy (the new batch of 2021 stock) is poor - very dusty straight out the packet, with noticeable crackles and a huge pop right during the intro of The Sound of Muzak. I've tried wet and dry cleaning, dusting and the usual but can't get rid of it. A shame the vinyl quality is not up tot he standard of the music.

Sound and package is good. But the disc is full of hairlines, fingerprints and it's very dirty, what gives him some background noises in the quiet passages. When you buy a new disc you spect that at least it's clean and without scratches.

Minimal fingerprints on release. There is some noise between tracks. Medium system.

The album sounds great, one of the best I have heard. I had only listened to a few tracks before getting this release and I was pleasantly entertained by the dynamics.

Fingerprints all over both of the records. I guess it's the factory to blame. A substantial amount of noise and crackles/pops throughout my first spin.

Loud pressing, full range, lucky that mine did not suffer from any factory defects.

Quality is typical "Optimal Media" which is another way of saying "appalling". Records came with surface scuffs from the factory. The sleeves are sandpaper-quality. I have non-fill on sides B and D at the end of the last tracks which come out as regular loud pops at every spin. Annoying. More than the usual amount of crackle on the rest of the records can be heard on quieter passages.

The remaster sounds fantastic. The original CD sounded great as well. It's a bit disappointing, that both "Drown with me" and "Chloroform" have been left off. This would have given this release an extra charm. As Steven Wilson is a vinyl lover too, I cannot understand, that he doesn't insist in having those releases antistatic inner sleeves. My copy was stained with small grains of vinyl and finger prints. Fortunately it caused no damages. There seems to a quality problem at Optimal media, where those lps were pressed.