The Smiley Smile Message Board

I'm considering trying to get some of my favourite BB albums on vinyl but really have no idea about the best pressings and all that. I'm after the best sound quality foremost (preferably without paying a fortune). Can anyone tell me which pressings I should look for for the following LPs:

Friends
Sunflower
Wild Honey
Today
Love You

Also is there a particularly good Smile bootleg on vinyl that anyone can recommend?

Many thanks,

B

I am a huge vinyl fan. The best Wild Honey is the simply vinyl reissue, try their website. Friends sounds best either in the early 80s or mid 90s Capitol reissues because they solve a problem with Tracendental Meditation's fade which was mastered wrong originally.  Today sounds good on the 94 reissue (these are hard to find but the Stack O Tracks is the only way to get the real Stereo version and Pet sounds with all 3 bonus cuts on vinyl)
Sunflower and Love You are good on the originalls as they all are except Friends. Today is hard to find clean though. Good luck and any other vinyl question let me know here or PM me .

I have a sealed vinyl original Sunflower and Surf's Up. I wonder what they might be worth?

I would say around 35-40 for Sunflower and $30-35 for Surfs Up

Many thanks MBE for the info - that's most useful.

I might add, you can easily find sealed copies of Love You for under or around $5.00, so I wouldn't get anything but sealed if I were you. The only drawback is that 99% of the sealed copies are cutouts.

Love You isn't too hard to find, for around that but it may cost upward of $10-15 sealed if it is from a dealer as opposed to an individual. No problem buddhahat I love to talk about records.

What is a cut-out version of a record??? Also, I bought Wild Honey on vinyl and it is in great condition . However, when I play the album it doesn't come out of the channels balanced....Anybody got any insights about this?? When i play any other record it comes out fine.

A "cut-out" album (or CD) is one that the retail store does not intend to restock and is reducing the sticker price for a quick sale. The term derives from literally cutting out a piece of the album cover where the bar code is located (with CDs, a hole is drilled through the case).

Regarding the "Wild Honey" LP: is this a Duophonic Stereo copy? The Duophonic process created artificial stereo by channeling low end signals to one speaker and high end signals to the other. The result could be an album that doesn't sound properly balanced.

For collecting purposes AND audio quality, I'd go for the original releases. The modern re-issues use digital masters if I'm not mistaken and any fule kno that analog is inherently better than digital for sound fidelity.

On the back of my Wild Honey album, in the upper right corner, it says:"STEREO This record may also be played safely on most modern monophonic equipment." The LP says stereo on it as well. I don't know if this album was really mono, and what I have is a reprint in stereo...It definetly doesn't say duophonic on it. Were there re-issues of this by Capitol records?? My copy seems to be original, but I don't know, there is no year on it. I bought it from a Rhino records store.

If your pressing is an original American, a mono copy will have "T 2859" in the front top right corner, and a "stereo" copy will have "ST 2859." Capitol did reissue the LP much later, and those have a green label and say "A Capitol Reissue" in the top left corner of the cover. It was reissued by Capitol again in the 1990's.

Mine is ST 2859. So I guess it's an original American, Right?? Did the band record this in mono or stereo?

Wild Honey was released in mono and fake stereo but I have heard some stereo outtakes posted by users on this board.

Again, forgive me, but what is fake stereo? I've seen that listed on my SOT Smile! for some of the songs. Is my Wild Honey LP in fake Stereo, even though it says stereo on it?

"Fake" (simulated) stereo is only a mono signal that has been manipulated to create the illusion of stereo by putting the mono signal on each channel of a stereo signal and then putting one slightly out of synch with the other, kind of like an echo in a stadium sound. It can also be done by re-equalizing the signal and putting all the high-end on one side and the low end on the other. This can be rather ugly sounding through headphones.

This is exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned "Duophonic" previously. I'm not certain why the original "Wild Honey" album would use the term "Stereo" on the cover, but it is generally known that Beach Boys albums from "Today" through "Wild Honey" were never released in true stereo (until "Pet Sounds" was remixed in '96).
I think you've got a "Duophonic" copy (or "fake stereo" to use the less polite term).

I think you're right  Roger Ryan. I have my speakers set up on opposite sides of my room. when I played WH the majority of sound was disproportionatly to one side of the room. I am just going to have to one day get my hands on an original MONO version. I think that Darling sounds so good on vinyl, far superior to the digital version. I appreciate the tip Roger. Over and Out.

It's not too hard to find in mono on vinyl . The 74 reissue was mono as was the early 80s and mid 90s ones. Simply vinyl's from the late 90s was mono too.

how do the reprise twofers compare (friends/WH)?  I know the reprise vinyl is held in high regard.  I'm guessing they're better than the original capitol pressings.

I think the Capitol pressing are good. As far as ease in finding a clean one the newer the pressing the better. I avoided the WB pressings olnly because I wanted the original covers.

It's been a long time, but I recall buying the Reprise 2-fers when they were all that was available and enjoying the heck out of the vinyl and liner notes....Then a used record store opened in town (Djangos) and I found original issue Capitol pressings....and preferred the sound on them to the Reprise re-issues. 

Haven't listened to them in 20 years or so, so this is based on memory.

oh okay, one more.  how do the capitol versions of PS compare with the reprise one put out in '72? Like the original pressing and subsequent ones, I guess when they were reissiued by cap in the 80's.

All of the pre 1990 versions of Pet Sounds have tne original mix. A lot of echo and a cough was removed from Here Today in 1990. I would have the say you are most likely going to find an early 80's pressing to be the easiest to find clean. I never heard a major difference otherwise.

The US Pet Sounds bundled with the original CATPST on Warner/Brother didn't sound anywhere near as good as the UK import that a friend of mine had to either of us.

would this british one  be an  original pressing from the 60's?  I guess those are a little easier to come by.  I have the CATP one as well as some early 80's cap stuff, just trying to find which versions are best since there are so many...


thanks

didn't capitol delete tracks on later issues in the 80's and early 90's?  Even  going so far as to rename albums.....the covers are cool but the motives behind them are inda scummy.....

btw, there's a reissued SOT Smile out now on vinyl.  About 1/2 the stuff isn't from the box...

I have original releases of all of the albums on capital amd warner.  Each is interesting in its own way and fun to listen to hear what people heard when the album was new.

Im partial to Surfin USA and Concert on capital, and on the later warner stuff, I really like Holland on vinyl.   Mount Vernon and Fairway seems especially nice on the little EP.

And about that duophonic, it is sometimes good, and sometimes bad, but usually interesting after years of steady listening to the twofers and such that are so sonically "perfect".

Vinyl is fun to collect and to listen to if you have time.   Seems I do most of my listening at the office, in the car, or out in my garage, working on the old chevy.   

Maybe vinyl sounds better sometimes because you are forced to put it on, change it frequently, clean the record, and generally be in a more atentive state while listening.

My hearing isn't so acute these days that I can really tell the difference between different formats.  However I still get a kick out of the idea of music being extracted from the groove mechanically.

From 1970 to 1994 when they did vinyl reissues, most of the vinyl LP's had tracls deleted Summer Days was issued on CD like this. Pet Sounds, Wild Honey, Smiley Smile, Xmas, and Friends were left alone and are like the originals, 20/20 and Party and a 1972? issue of Surfin Safari  had all the original cuts, but the covers were somewhat changed. The 1994 ones are very rare now, but they are the only way to get Pet Sounds on vinyl with all three bonus cuts, and Stack O Tracks on vinyl in non duophonic sound. For me  I like an LP to have the original cover and cuts. I don't really care when it was pressed, but I want the orignal presentation. That's partially the reason I buy LP's over CD's in the first place.

The SOT smile came out about 3-4 years ago. It's pretty good sonically, but has a slightly noisey pressing.

I think the CATP/Pet Sounds album on Warner from 1972 is a great pressing.  Also, it was pressed from the original West Coast tape, which was later damaged (losing the original mono version of Wouldn't It Be Nice, and the last 20 seconds or so of Caroline No).  The damaged tape was then lost in the early 1990's.

Can anyone tell me how the Surf's Up reissue (I think the most recent one "From the vaults" printed on the front or something similar) compares to the original vinyl?

Many thanks!

Wild Honey Stereo is not traditional duophonic.  It's the cheap "high end on one side, low end on the other side" phony stereo.  Regarding "Friends"- nothing beats my 1968 original, and I've got all the different releases.  The 1990 2-fer cd has the stereo channels narrowed, as does the vinyl that was issued from that series, so avoid that one.  The 1983 Capital recut lp is nice, but the 1968 has more dynamic range.

Simply Vinyl pressings are generally good, but they master from commercial CDs.


OK pressing, but again, mastered from CD-resolution masters.  I believe that's true of all the "From the Vault" repressings.  They're not gonna sound awful, but if you can find a clean original pressing it will be better. 


Nice thing about this mix is that it can be summed back to mono and will sound basically identical to the actual mono mix.  I've got a stereo Wild Honey pressing and I just flip the "mono" switch on my amp to sum the channels, and it sounds pretty great and well balanced.  I've still got my eye out for a nice mono LP but I'm not too bothered about having this one.

Pardon the ignorance, but....

When they say 'master from CDs', do they mean a company like Simply Vinyl uses an actual CD off the shelves to get their master from? Or am I being dense and they are using the same digital masters as the CDs do? I have had some confusion with a Spiritualized reissue on Plain Recordings on this issue, is all.

In the case of Simply Vinyl, yeah, from what I've heard, you are basically hearing an off-the-shelf CD plugged into a cutting lathe.  There are a lot of grey-market vinyl reissue companies in the UK & Europe that are doing stuff like this, but Simply Vinyl seem to be one of the more above-board ones, so they presumably are actually licensing the rights to the stuff they're reprinting, but they don't go as far as actually obtaining masters to cut from.  In the case of the Capitol reissues my understanding is that they are cutting from the same master files as used to make the CD.  It's possible they could be cut from higher digital resolutions but everything I've seen suggests they are just at CD resolution.  Conversely I think it's been settle that the Smile Sessions vinyl was cut from a really nice high-resolution digital source since everybody seems to agree it sounds way better than the CD.

This isn't the worst thing in the world, especially when it involves bringing stuff back into print that is totally impossible to find otherwise, but if original copies still circulate, it's pretty pointless. 

Best place to hear the 1967-69 albums are the Warner reissues from 1974. Pet Sounds is best on the 1972 CATP bundle.

Thanks for the info, anazgnos. I bought the WH reissue recently but had no idea these were just taken straight from the cds! Guess I start searching for the originals, where possible.

Just bought the 1972 CATP set, and the Warner Pet Sounds is amazing!