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New vinyl's noisy little secret

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the current crop of vinyl formulations just have higher noise levels than LPs made years ago. A case in point--I stumbled upon an old, original copy of Henry Mancini's 1962 soundtrack to the movie "Hatari" in my collection a few days ago (I had never even played it), and was astonished at its deathly quiet playback. Simply no surface noise. What gives? OK, you may make fun of this black-label RCA pressing (LSP-2559) for its content musically (though it's actually pretty fun), but it sure reminded me what we are missing with new releases--super high quality vinyl with very low surface noise. Even the occasional mechanical clicks from scratches seemed subdued. Most of my (expensive!) new vinyl comes replete with very onerous surface noise. Is it just impossible to make this old-generation type of vinyl currently?
kipdent

Showing 1 response by ptmconsulting

ptmconsulting
1,000 posts
 
I read something, somewhere that discussed the new vs old pressing plants. In the old days they wer running full stream every day. The presses were making thousands of records a day.

These days the plants are making only hundreds of records in small, custom batches. As a result the presses are barely warmed up before they are finished with the run. As a result the vinyl isn't flowing as smoothly and imperfections are more prominent.

Now I have no freakin idea if this theory holds and water at all, but it seemed plausable to me when I read it.

Bob
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