Bad vinyl

I rarely have found a record, new or used that was unacceptable to me.  Perhaps this is related to our expectations?  I do not expect perfection.  Warps?  They are axiomatic.  The question for me is not:  Is the record warped?  Rather, the question should be will the record play cleanly and without audible distortion due to warping?  Clicks and pops?  They are going to be found, the issue is how many?  If you can't live with any, you are headed for constant frustration.  Surface noise?   My brain learned how to filter it out listening to 78s a long time ago.  Records are an imperfect medium learn to be flexible or find another medium.

There is a definite difference in our perception for whatever reason. What you refer to as the golden days, I remember as the bad old days. I am 69 years old and started listening to my grandmother’s extensive jazz record collection of 78s when I needed to stand on a stool to reach the crank handle to wind up her Victrola. Seriously. I still have records I bought in in the mid 1950s with money earned from mowing lawns and from my paper route. In general the records made today are better, higher quality, quieter, flatter, thicker, and sound better overall than was the norm back in the day. With that said, I still buy a lot of old records and in general the survivors sound pretty good too. Part of this is that my hearing is not picking up as well as it once did of course. But then, too, in spite of deterioration due to age, I know how to listen better than ever. Another factor is that back in the hey day of vinyl a lot of regrind was added back into the vat and remelted to get as great a yield as possible out of the PVC pellets. This reached a crisis during the oil embargo in the early 1970s, (thank you Mr. Kissinger!). A lot of records were returned too because they were just not listenable, and of course these are not remembered now and people like you wax nostalgic about the good ole days. Sheesh.

There is another factor we have in our favor now, which is that companies like VPI make record flattening systems and others make vacuum systems to help hold the records flat. There are some fantastic record cleaning machines out there too, that did not exist back in the hey day of vinyl either. For those that don’t know it, making records is a dirty business. Even new records benefit from a deep clean before they are played for the first time. Finally, there are chemical treatments like those from LAST that not only help to preserve our records, but make them quieter too. So while you are lamenting the passing of some bygone era that you wish for, you are missing the fact that the best it has ever been is right now.