Paul Romero (3), Rob King, Steve Baca – Heroes Of Might And Magic III Original Soundtrack

Please repress it! It is a pity that such beautiful music must be so limited and overpriced.

I am just listening the whole thing, side A sounds very good, spacious and engaging. Side B is awful. Distortion, false sounding. The rest is fine again. Not really sure what happened there but it's a shame, Rampart and Stronghold are my favourite tunes.

Great looking art, alright packaging (it's a little flimsy).
I went with the black vinyl hoping to have the least amount of noise, sadly side B is extremely noisy/hissy. It sounds like non-fill.
The music and the quality of it sounds great, but the extreme amount of noise on side B holds this release back from being truly essential.

Naturally, I contacted the company to see if it was possible to get/buy a replacement for the first disc, but they answered with the following: "Sorry to hear about the crackling. We are almost 100% sure it is dirt. It happens sometimes. We listened to the test press very carefully, and we also listened to a few randomly picked copies delivered from the pressing plant. Most are clean - sometimes there is dirt in different places, but there is never a mistake in one place repeated on all the items. Unfortunately, there are contaminants in the production process - this is very typical for vinyls. We recommend the use of a professional washer (available at vinyl stores). You may need to wash it 2-3 times.".

Cleaning didn't fix the issue, at all. This is of course a little disappointing. Here's hoping I'm the only unlucky one!