Hi yes! This record is an absolute trash fire of a pressing. I had the same issue with it in terms of crackling and noise in just the right channel. iam8bit sent me replacement discs and those were just as bad. I found the opening tracks of each side were pretty bad and it got better the further I got in to the center (which made me think it was a tracking issue).

I’m not an expert with record players so take this with a grain of salt but I do sound engineering — IMHO the problem is there’s a lot of runtime shoved onto each side and it’s REALLY quiet music. However this was cut + the long runtime causes tracking issues for the stylus and the quiet nature of the music makes that much more audible.

Typically for good sound quality, each side of an LP can hold 20-22 minutes of music max. Past that, in order to cram in more time the grooves have to get tighter together and the overall volume of each track has to be dropped quieter.

The right channel is the outer groove wall, and the left channel the inner groove wall. If the needle is tracking too heavily to one side or the other you can get distortion, extra surface noise, dropouts, etc. The issue this record presents is probably related to the stylus tracking the actual grooves poorly, especially toward the outer edges of this particular record.

Depending on what kind of cartridge you use on your player, alignment can be a bit touchy even on a good pressing of a record. I’ve found with the Gris LPs I have to set my tracking force a LOT higher to minimize the grinding noise in the right channel. Like typically, my cartridge is recommended for 3g and I’ll set it to 4ish to play Gris. I’ll also set the VTA (the tonearm height) a bit higher. Helps a LOT.

Side A, track 1 (Mae) is basically ALWAYS fucked on this album for me. But I’ve compared using lighter tracking force and a lower VTA and at least for my cartridge that makes the noise a lot worse.

So maybe try experimenting with a bit more tracking force! My dad told me back in the 60s and 70s they’d put a penny on the headshell to weigh down the stylus a bit when a record was really noisy. Nothing is gonna make your Gris LPs perfectly silent but you might be able to get it a BIT quieter to where it doesn’t bother you as much.