The White Stripes – Get Behind Me Satan XX

I'm honestly surprised and super happy with this edition. Both the white and red vinyl, as usual, are perfectly flat—no warping at all—and I barely notice any surface noise between tracks. Of course, there are a few demos with the typical demo sound—more midrange-heavy and rough around the edges. But hey, that's the charm of a demo! I love hearing how a song evolved through a demo into what it eventually became.

The live vinyl really surprised me in a good way—the audio quality is excellent. Vault live records are usually soundboard recordings (not always), but in this case, the sound is really, really good. The low end is amazing!

I love the box—it’s similar to the rest of the White Stripes XX collection, but this one feels slightly thinner. Did anyone else notice that?

The book is beautiful, with great photos. I just wish it had more pages, haha.

Very happy to have this piece in my collection.
Greetings from Buenos Aires!

There's a really silly dissonance between understanding the difference between source material quality and mastering and lacquer cutting on this site. Much of the recording used on the live LP was not recorded for a hi-fi and/or audiophile listening experience. Then it was mixed in-house by Bill Skibbe to attempt to both get as much out of it as possible but also align it with how TMR would like it to sound, then Skibbe handed it off to Warren Defever for the actual lacquer cutting, which seems to me to have no notable flaws, mistakes, skips, etc.

This entire chain is limited by the quality of the source recordings, and this album sounds terrific when compared to many White Stripes live recordings of the era. The band has always prized a lo-fi sound, and unless some special accommodations were made two decades ago to capture a show at a higher level of SQ, this is what TMR has to work with, and by no means is this not living up to an imagined expectation to be blamed on Defever at the lacquer cutting stage, which shows a laughable lack of understanding as to how a record gets produced in the first place. You know that old adage about keeping your mouth shut so nobody knows how stupid you are? A lot of Discogs users might get something out of it.

Thought this was one of the better Vault releases in a while. Really nice choices made throughout, fascinating to see the development of some of these songs. Maybe it could've been fun to do something next level with the disc colors, but they have to crank out a lot of these Vault packages in a short window of time, and at least the jacket/packaging itself looks stunning.

Really nice release overall.

Very little if any warping on the discs, and very little (still some) surface noise overall. You’d think that should be the minimum requirement but some modern releases don’t exactly follow that.

Packaging is really nice. Just wish there was slightly more convenient packaging for the DVD and 45. Wary of using the DVD holder in the booklet because I feel it’d somehow fall through and get scratched up, but if they really wanted us to use it they probably should have packed it in there in the first place.

Really enjoy the DVD/BluRay. Will probably be the thing that I come back to the most.

As one person mentioned and from what I can tell, As Ugly as I Seem at the very least sounds like the same take, if not the same. Maybe it’s an alternate mix or maybe (and just in general) my system isn’t advanced enough to really make anything of it.

Kinda disappointed in the live disc. My favorite song off the album, Take Take Take, only gets like two verses and then a fade-out. Overall I’d love to have seen some actual Take Take Take representation. The song itself has some nice layered bits which lends it to having an interesting base track and of course simply hearing the whole song live would have been stellar, I liked what I heard but I wasn’t enough.

Everything else, especially As Ugly As I Seem sound really good though.

Overall, there’s some really fun high-quality stuff in this package that can really only be marred by small personal preferences.

Better be sure to buy one of these from TMr so you can not listen to it and flip it to suckers on discogs!

Perhaps it is my ears but I cannot hear any difference between this version of As Ugly As I Seem and the standard album version. The whole song sounds identical. I'd be interested if anyone else can discern anything that suggests otherwise!

Waaarps warps warps warps warps waaarps warps... (set to the tune of "7 Nation Army").

I don't agree that the live cuts are dead as a doornail. They ring like a doorbell, just open up. Seriously though there are live albums with atrocious sound quality third man has put out and this ain't one. Sounds great.

Why go to all this expense and shove the records into one tight sleeve and the inner sleeves are just paper. No antistatic.

The DVD is hard to find - you may have to give the box a good shake to dislodge from the booklet sleeve.

GBMS is one of my all-time favorite albums, and definitely my fave Jack White-related album. While the most recent European cut of the full GBMS album itself sounded incredible (done on a restored, all-tube system by Wes Garland at NRP), this one does not sound good. In fact it is among the most disappointing records I've heard lately.

This one was cut by Warren Defever and this package proves he may be my least favorite mastering engineer of all time. I don't know anything about him, but just about everything he cuts sounds the same - dull, lifeless, dark, and boring. I'm not talking about the songwriting demos, which are understandably lo-fi, I'm talking about everything else here. The outtakes are spectacular to hear, but they are hindered by a lackluster mixing & mastering job. Everything sounds so lifeless!

The live cuts are dead-as-a-doornail. I've been looking forward to the GBMS Live stuff for so long now, and it was a major swing and a miss with the sound quality. These tunes should be bursting with energy, but they sound totally flat and uninviting. Go to YouTube and watch TWS "From The Basement" or their Glastonbury performance from 2005. THAT is what the White Stripes sound like live in this era! Full of raw, intense energy that just rips through your speakers and moves your soul. Even the Blu-ray audio, which seems to be an amateur mix (or even cam-audio sometimes!) comes across better than the LP + 7". The vinyl discs in this vault package? All the highs are rolled off, the detail is lost, and the whole thing is just plain BORING.

I don't know if it's TMR's equipment, or just Mr. Defever's personal taste, but this is one of many Vault / TMR records I've gotten where the sound is just ruined, like a wet blanket all over everything. (I'll assume it's TMR's mastering equipment, because Bill Skibbe's cuts sound very similarly dull.) The "Elephant" mono mix and the "Live in Las Vegas" vault packages were equally disappointing in terms of their sound quality. I'm no "holier than thou audiophile" (as Jack once accused his fans of being), I'm just someone who wants to hear stuff sound good. This package does NOT sound good.

On the plus side, all of the material here is incredible. The songwriting demos are fascinating, the outtakes are a treasure, and the Blu-ray - WOW - what a treat! You get live cuts, sound checks, and an almost full concert performance. Unreal. Considering it was shot on a MiniDV camera, the picture quality is astounding. Thank you, TMR, for putting it out on a Blu-ray instead of an ancient DVD.

In summation, A+ on the choice of material, D+/C- on the sound quality.

Equipment:
Technics SL-1210GR
VM540ML cartridge
Japanese WBC Amphenol RCA cables
Schiit Mani preamp
Onkyo receiver (non-phono input)
JBL Stage A170 speakers