Todays new vinyl LP's better than LP's 40 yrs ago?

Audiofeil wrote: That is the flaw in your argument.

There was more consistency and higher quality years ago.

You seem fond of telling me about my own experience. Interesting!

I've been transferring my well cared for LPs to digital for my music server over the past 7 or 8 years. This has involved substantially more than 2,000 LPs, many from the era you laud.

My experience is that truly pristine and exceptional pressings have never been routine or commonplace. The majority is certainly acceptable, but I don't get too excited about lauding mediocrity.

Perhaps we just looking for different things. ;-)

Back in the pre-CD era there were constant complaints about vinyl quality. The vaunted Mercury Living Presence series came in for LOT of criticism about noisy surfaces. Warps and off-center pressings were rife. One of the reasons CDs were so highly praised at the beginning was the abysmal quality of vinyl at that time. You had to be there to remember how bad things were. I was.

Today's reissues are by and large much better in terms of pressing quality, flatness and pops/clicks. I know folks have problems with this, but if they think things are bad, they should have been buying records in the past. I'm not talking sonics; sound quality (of reissues) hinges on the condition of the tapes.

Expectations for vinyl are high among a smaller dedicated group these days. That may be part of it.

In think the late 60s and 70s were the golden age of vinyl. It was during 80s they used recycle materials. I even have one with plastic straw embedded in the lp.

By the 1970s, quality control was going to pot, consistent with the increased production and sale of records and the petroleum/plastic problems around 1974 when OPEC cut oil production and a lot of regrind vinyl began to be used.