Soft Machine – Third

It seems inconceivable that a major player like Sony would reissue this album in a new digipak format in 2002 without having remastered it, but I can't seem to see anywhere that it says it was. Usually they trumpet that, but they are strangely silent here. Can anyone speak to this? Thanks.

Soft Machine's Third is truly one of the great recordings from the fabled Canterbury Scene. Legend has it that Robert Wyatt was the sole instrumentalist on the first third of "Moon In June" and based on how I would have expected Mike Ratledge to have played it I can believe that this is true. The remaining three sides show us the newer side of the Machine as they moved away from the prog-rock of the first two albums into the jazz-rock that would dominate the remainder of the band's existence. My original copy was the first pressing of the US version in 1970 and it was noisy to say the least. I played the hell out of it, though, so it now has surface noise AND pops/ticks. Alas, the CD version is much cleaner and mastered correctly. (RIP Mike Ratledge, Elton Dean and Hugh Hopper. Who would have figured that Wyatt would be the last one left?)

My press is not cut quiet as some has mentioned. The mixing of the record is not very good though. Very boomy mid tone especially from the synths and bass guitar. It makes the higher frequencies very quiet in comparison, so the cymbals and hi-hats are floating somewhere almost indistinguishable on top of the sound image,

Nothing special; better to get a decent OG. Nasty cover repro - brown paper is orange, and the subtle letter shadows end up as a black cludge. 'Soft touch' card is cheesy. Pressing nothing to write home about.

Great pressing. Run out are very small which means they uses all the place to cut the vinyl without too much compression just as the US pressing, they have the same run out groove area. This canadian pressing has also the same matrix than the Us Pitman and Terre Haute except that there is a "C" that was add between the ○P ... The cover suggest they use the Terre Haute variant with only the "G" code on front cover.

Incredible sound. The horns, bass, keyboards, and drums all sound perfect and none of them overpower the others. My press has very light crackles in some areas, but I can’t focus on it because I’m too busy being mesmerized by the near perfect mix and sound quality. Highly recommend, I somehow got this beauty for only $9.99.

my copy sounds awful. The life and the studio recordings, both have a lot of distortions. Sound is muffed. No details and no dynamics. Usually Music on Vinyl does a good job but this is nearly unlistenable to me at least. I prefer the Qobuz stream in this case.

Very mixed pressing.
The first three sides of the disc
are very quiet without clicks.
The big disappointment comes on the fourth side of the disc.
A lot of clicks at the beginning and a somewhat distorted sound.

This CD sounds better than the 2 vinyl versions I’ve heard (US original, 2016 MoV).

As someone else mentioned, these seem to be cut at very low levels, both my VG+ copies suffer from surface noise. Facelift recording quality is pretty poor but what a great piece!