01-15-09: Xiekitchen
I was going to talk about the Pat Metheny recordings but I see someone beat me to it. The sound quality of "Still Life" is very good, but the pressing itself and vinyl suck. My Geffin label pressing suffers from noisy bad vinyl. too bad, as the Metheny recording is wonderful.
I have three Geffen Metheny recordings and they all are very quiet and dynamic. I have no complaints about the mastering, vinyl, or pressing quality. I suspect your record was stamped near the end of the life of that particular stamper, and should have been replaced beforehand.
1-15-09: Mapman
The golden age of vinyl preceded the 80's. More and more (not all) vinyl products were suffering deeply by the time CDs came into vogue.
My experience doesn't match this at all. As I write this I've just listened to two great-sounding '80s albums, "Business as Usual" by Men at Work and "How WIll the Wolf Survive?" by Los Lobos. I have many 1980s LPs spanning several labels and genres--The Police, The Cars, Elvis Costello, Go-Gos, the Geffen Metheny albums, Stevie Winwood, Dwight Yoakam, Manhattan Transfer, Bobby McFerrin, Stray Cats, London and Deutsche Grammofon classical, etc.
Either I've been *extraordinarily* lucky or the '80s was a second golden age for LPs. Yes the vinyl is thinner, but in my experience if you can adjust VTA and have a record clamp to reduce resonances, thin vinyl is a non-factor. Some of my better-sounding records are of the notoriously thin Dynaflex variety. By the '80s the analog tape decks had an s/n of 100 dB or more and there were many talented engineers, mixers, and masterers who could put together a good record in the analog domain in their sleep.
I have a few albums from this era that are a bit bass-shy -- the Men at Work and at least one Stray Cats album, but even those are very quiet, clean, and dynamic. Many others such as from The Police and The Cars are very transparent, dynamic, and have excellent extension at the frequency extremes.
