Pharoah Sanders – Tauhid

Solid 4/5 on sound. Rich and voluminous.
The cover could be better.

No surface noise on my copy, but sound is a bit murky. I have never heard an original pressing, but I have read reviews that say the original was a bit murky as well (although this is unusual for Impulse records from this era). It sounds like an analog source, but possibly a needle drop, as another reviewer has suggested. Overall, my experience is better than some detailed below, but I'd love to hear an original for comparison sake. Not a terrible listen, but I'm still debating whether I want to keep it or not.

My copy sounds just great. Dynamic, quiet, smooth. Good value pressing. When I read the negative comments here about sound quality I start to get suspicious of the posters’ motives.

This is the saddest reissue I own and I think about this everytime I look at it's cheap sleeve and the corners cut on the labels and inner sleeve. Imagine the other two Pharoah reissues from the same time follow suite.

This pressing sounds horrible. The surface noise is unbelievable. Maybe I was just unlucky, but I can't imagine one sounding good if this one sounds so bad. Save your money.

Good sounding reissue. I just A/B’d one against a nm 1968 copy and the difference was negligible in of sound. Too bad that they didn’t try harder with the cover and label. But if you care mostly about the music, this version is worth it for the price.

I have heard this all the way through. Quiet pressing with almost no surface noise. Totally agree about the packaging - would have been happy to pay more to get a repro of the original gatefold. Not the best reissue but certainly could have been much worse. I'm just glad to have this music available.

Not only does this release come in a normal cover while the original came in a beautiful gatefold (apparently the production cost would've been too high according to Ant'Recs), the sound quality is simply appalling.
This was sourced from 'original mint vinyl records', which is a romanic way to put it. In other words, it is a vinyl rip or 'needle drop'. How does it sound? Distorted, noisy, and oddly mixed. The guitar solo sounds like from a high school demo tape, the drums have no kick, the piano is flat. On top of it all, mine came with a massive amount of deep carved scratches that look like someone tried to scratch a Jackson Pollock painting into the wax, which tells me enough about the quality control performed with this release.
The labels are also low quality scans from the original discs with a high resolution Anthology label stuck on top. Yes, looks exactly like it sounds. Who on earth gets a test print/pressing like this and says "Yes, this is perfect, let's do it?"

Save your money, save up enough, and buy an original Impulse record. It will cost you triple the amount, but you will hold a rare piece of Jazz history in your hands, not this embarrassing replica. It is a shame for those folks that buy this, thinking that it is the way this beautiful piece of music is meant to sound like.