Vinyl Reports

Texas rock-funk keyboard legend and composer Edgar Winter once wrote, “I’ve heard it said there’s beauty in distortion.” Besides it being the opening line to one of his most beautiful songs (“Dying to Live,” from Side 2 of 1971’s Edgar Winter’s White Trash LP), that sentiment — which I first heard as a 10-year-old while listening to my older brother’s albums — resonated with me strongly, and thus, I grew up appreciating the music of Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, and many other artists who embraced unconventional modes of expression carved from the palette of electronic instrumentation: noise, feedback and of course, distortion.

I’m glad for this early exposure because, once I got deeper into the music of artists who fit a similar nonconventional mold — Lou Reed as a solo artist, as well as his earlier band, The Velvet Underground — in college, I was fully prepared to appreciate the incredible sounds he and his avant-garde group created together in the late-1960s, especially on their iconic, banana-clad, Andy Warhol-driven and designed debut LP on Verve, March 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico. A recording indeed rich with beauty and distortion, there is even a warning one of the engineers scrawled on the album’s original master tape boxes that reads, “Noise & Distortion / Too Many Overdubs.”

The Velvet Underground & Nico LP — featuring hypnotic model-turned-chanteuse Nico along with guitarist/vocalist Lou Reed, violist/bassist John Cale, rhythm guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer/percussionist Mo Tucker — is arguably one of the most influential recordings in rock & roll history. Co-produced by Tom Wilson (Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Sun Ra, Simon & Garfunkel) and legendary pop artist, impresario, and media personality Andy Warhol (who served more as a presenter than a hands-on producer here, really), the music contained in its hallowed grooves is iconic and timeless.

A bona-fide failure upon its initial 1967 release, the album has gone on to achieve legendary status for various, iconic reasons (more on all that in a bit). With original pressings having long been much sought after, pricey collector’s items, Republic/UMe’s Vinylphyle Series reissue of The Velvet Underground & Nico as a 180g LP on November 14, 2025, aims to deliver a high-quality, archive-worthy edition priced within the reach of most music fans.

I have been listening quite closely to this new Vinylphyle edition in addition to comparing it to my rare original pressings, and I am happy to report that this may well be the ideal option for most of us who just want the best possible sounding — and best looking! — version of this incredible recording for regular playback.

Before I delve into the depths of the Vinylphyle version of The Velvet Underground & Nico, let’s first extract some of the crucial DNA that helps make this reissue better than many prior attempts. From UMe’s official press materials, we learn of the Vinylphyle series’ intended integrity: “Each Vinylphyle release will feature all-analog mastering from original sources by an elite group of today’s top vinyl cutting engineers. The LPs will be pressed at the world-class Southern California-based audiophile vinyl record pressing plant Record Technology, Inc. better known amongst vinyl lovers as RTI, on 180-gram black vinyl.”

Continued the press release, “Similar in presentation and execution to Blue Note’s acclaimed Tone Poet series, the production and packaging [for Vinylphyle LPs] seek to honor the stature of these recordings, and will include tip-on wrapped gatefold jackets in satin matte finish, printed on clay-coated board, with archival poly sleeves and a four-panel insert featuring new liner notes.” (In this case, the self-professed “music nerd” and web personality Anthony Fantano provided the liners.)

Once more, from the press release: “Backed by RTI’s craftsmanship, these releases are produced at the highest levels and include extensive quality controls at every step of the process, from mastering to plating to pressing and printing, ensuring a superb final product.” Joe Nino-Hernes of Sterling Sound is credited with mastering this LP from the original analog master tapes.

You can read more about this LP and the other three initial entries in the Vinylphyle Series in AP editor Mike Mettler’s New Wax Wednesday preview here, which posted on November 5, 2025. The 180g 1LP Vinylphyle edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico sports an SRP of $39.98, and it can be ordered directly, and exclusively, at uDiscover Music right here.

There is a legendary anecdote about The Velvet Underground & Nico attributed in some circles to a conversation Brian Eno had with Lou Reed back in the early 1980s. The gist of the story is that, according to Reed himself, The Velvet Underground & Nico LP only sold a dismal 30,000 copies over the first five years after its 1967 debut. Eno reportedly reflected that everyone who bought those initial albums was inspired to start a new band (and he was probably pretty close in that estimate).

That low number of sales would also help explain why original copies of The Velvet Underground & Nico on the Verve label have always been sought after as collector’s items. This is a supremely iconic album, and one that only seems to steadily increase in its influence by gaining new fans year by year, generation by generation. Along with that rising level of its well-deserved popularity, so rises the collectability of those rare original Verve pressings — many of which were played to death by fans, or destroyed due to the ravages of time.

As far back as I can remember, when I started getting deeply into collecting albums back in the mid-1970s, that iconic banana cover was always an on-the-wall display prize in the hippest of used record shops around the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area. For a quick reference of its ongoing collector’s status today, as of this posting, there were 16 originals of The Velvet Underground & Nico on Discogs ranging in price between just under $500 to more than $2,000, across a variety of conditions.

While there have been numerous reissues of The Velvet Underground & Nico over the years of varying quality — including many dubious gray market, pirated editions having long flooded the marketplace — the original incarnations with the peelable banana sticker on the cover remain a holy grail for serious fans and collectors. (Footnote 1)

Even though many audiophile-leaning collectors (like me!) have numerous incarnations of The Velvet Underground & Nico, many of us have also often dreamt of owning a nice, clean, authentic-sounding “playable” copy, in order to preserve our prized originals. I have CD versions of this album and have also owned later LP reissues over the years, but those just haven’t met the sonic cut for me.

That said, this entry in UMe’s new Vinylphyle series, however, is the first really nice reissue of this album I’ve heard/seen to date, and it may well become my “go-to” playback copy. It remains true to the sound of the original LP — with that beautiful distortion intact, in all its raging, proto-punk glory — as well as honoring the iconic Andy Warhol-designed packaging, with museum-quality elegance and grace.

From the recreating of the peelable Andy Warhol banana on the front cover to featuring the uncensored “torso” photo on the back cover (which was once airbrushed out to avoid a lawsuit from the model featured in it), this new LP edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico is really quite glorious, inside and out. The vinyl pressing from RTI is exemplary.

Perhaps the only tiny “ding” I can attribute here is that the teal-like color of the Verve label is not quite an exact match to the original rich royal blue 1967 editions, as seen below.

That slight ding is forgivable from my perspective, especially since this album sounds so very good! In fact, at first, the RTI pressing was so perfectly dead-quiet that I found it almost a bit unsettling, accustomed as I’d become to hearing a bit of surface noise from the original pressings I own of The Velvet Underground & Nico.

As mentioned earlier, I compared the new Vinylphyle edition to the best of my two originals — an early copy with the rare “lawsuit sticker” covering up the soon enough-to-be-censored torso image on the back cover — and this new edition sounds very similar. The volume levels are close, but the level of clarity here feels vastly improved. Likely less compressed, inevitably the new edition sounds a bit brighter. But with that clarity, more details become audible now.

For example, on “Venus in Furs” (Side A, Track 4), the presence of Tucker’s bass drum is improved, delivering more of an airy sense of the studio they were recording in and that instrument’s resonance therein (i.e., more boom, less thud!), and the tambourine sounds super-crisp and more realistic. On “Run Run Run” (Side A, Track 5), Reed’s vocals are super-clear, especially when the harmonies kick in on the choruses. And that feedback guitar solo scorches! Again, things are much brighter here, but not in an off-putting way.

The Nico-led “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (Side A, Track 6) finds Tucker’s bass drum again appearing super-resonant. For comparison, I went back to one of my CD versions, and it just sounds flat there. “Heroin” (Side B, Track 1) is as especially amazing, with Cale’s screeching viola reaching ear-bleed-level nirvana. “European Son” (Side B, Track 5) is also super-clear, which is a special experience given that it’s home to even more of that beautiful distortion!

I could go on into more nuanced minutiae, but I think by now you get the idea that this is a very good reissue, one that may satiate fans who simply want a great-sounding, authentic-feeling recreation of the original without breaking the bank. If you can’t afford or don’t have an original, this new edition is a better bet.

The Music of The Velvet Underground & Nico, of course, rates an easy, off-the-charts 11, especially given its incalculable influence on other musicians/composers over the ensuing years. Sonically, while this Vinylphyle edition may indeed be among the best-sounding versions of the album itself — and despite its inherent moments of noise and distortion — it still rates a solid 9 for Sound. The beautiful parts raise it up, but from an audiophile perspective, distortion — as beautiful a superpower it may be, artistically speaking — is still technically distortion, so some may feel we need to keep our enthusiasm in check. (Footnote 2)

Maybe someday we’ll hear a 2LP 45rpm edition, or perhaps they’ll find some mysterious, less over-saturated alternate master buried in the archives. But for now, this new Vinylphyle edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico ranks very highly in my book — and hopefully, it will soon resonate just as much, if not more, in your own respective collections as well.

Author bio: Mark Smotroff is an avid vinyl collector who has also worked in marketing communications for decades. He has reviewed music for eCoustics, among others, and you can see more of his impressive C.V. at LinkedIn.

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Footnote 1: AP editor Mike Mettler adds: As you can see directly below, I have an original 1967 Verve pressing of The Velvet Underground & Nico LP (VS-5008), albeit with the banana peeled off to reveal the pink husk underneath. (Sorry if it’s a spoiler image for some of you!) That’s probably why I was able to buy it for a reasonable price 40 years ago when I went to a record show one weekend in the fall of 1985 in Des Moines during my freshman year of college. If memory serves, I most likely got it for between $40-$50, since I didn’t have enough money in hand to afford much more than that (other than also picking up a well-worn original 1967 Moby Grape LP on Columbia with Don Stevenson’s middle finger showing on the cover — but I digress).

At any rate, I too agree with Mark that the new Vinylphyle edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico is indeed great for semi-regularly scheduled repeat playback sessions, and I also essentially echo his overall sentiments, track for track. I would only add that I got chills listening to the even more delicate, ethereal nature of Reed’s dreamy lead vocal and the clarity of Cale’s left-channel celesta on “Sunday Morning” (Side A, Track 1), along with the character of Nico’s clearly unschooled but still touching lead vocals on “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (Side B, Track 3). I also appreciated that the 180g LP comes in a plastic-lined audiophile-grade plastic sleeve, this one adorned with the RTI logo. The LP itself was deep black, well-centered, and flat, with no pops or clicks.

Oh, and have I been tempted to follow the cover’s clear instructions to “peel slowly and see,” you might ask? Not with this new edition, mind you — I ain’t that bananas! (Sorry / not sorry!)

Footnote 2: Mettler again: I concede the point that certain audiophiles tend to get their hackles up about albums that proudly feature distortion or other non-purist sound offerings, but I’m willing to put those things aside in order to enjoy the merits of the music and the intentions of the artists themselves, upon dropping the needle. Thus, I also have no qualms giving the Music of The Velvet Underground & Nico the full goes-to-11 treatment. The sound of this Vinylphyle edition is also the best version I’ve heard to date, so I have no problem taking the Sound rating up another half-notch from Mark’s to 9.5. If you have any level of affinity for the groundbreaking, abject artistry of The Velvets from the literal jump, then get this LP ASAP.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO
180g 1LP (Republic/UMe)
MUSIC: 11
SOUND: 9

Original album produced By Tom Wilson and Andy Warhol with The Velvet Underground
Original album director of engineering by Val Valentin
Original album engineered by Omi Haden, T.T.G. Hollywood
Original album edited and remixed under the supervision of Tom Wilson by Gene Radice and David Green
Reissue all-analog mastering (vinyl lacquers) by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound, Nashville
180g vinyl pressed at RTI

Side A
1. Sunday Morning
2. I’m Waiting For The Man
3. Femme Fatale
4. Venus In Furs
5. Run Run Run
6. All Tomorrow’s Parties

Side B
1. Heroin
2. There She Goes Again
3. I’ll Be Your Mirror
4. The Black Angel’s Death Song
5. European Son (To Delmore Schwartz)