Golden age of vinyl recordings?

50's and early 60's. After 68 the multi tracks, 16 tracks and high compression started. All killed realism and color and tone. Producer's became as important as the artists, so you started hearing a "sound" Early 50's mono killed any mono Beatles or any British recordings, that how far ahead we were in making high sound quality recordings and the masters who made them sound as real as possible.  That was the golden era and never will be bettered. 

Yeah. Never I don't know, but the way it has been going since those times probably not in the foreseeable future. Besides, tube equipment and tape decks are most likely to be extinct soon enough. Attitude is not as it used to be, things must radically change for real accomplishments. 

Tube equipment certainly isn’t going to be extinct any time soon...sales of tube guitar amps far outnumber tube home audio stuff...maybe 100 to 1 (possibly much more), and tape decks are having a revival including cassettes, although those might be a fad. Updated and newly designed reel to reel decks are basically state of the art for playback these days. Regarding post ’68 vinyl, I have a lot of amazing stuff from the 60s to current production that sounds astonishingly good, and to think otherwise is weirdly narrow and ignores the astonishing revival of great vinyl, thousands of great recordings, and the brilliant engineers and mastering pros who make it happen.

For me, the golden age has a lot to do with the music as well as the technology and is in the post-psych era in the UK, say ’68-71 or a little later. Studios were still somewhat primitive, bands had to be capable of playing the songs ’live in the studio’ rather than depending on dubbing in better parts. (Yes, they could overdub early on, but it wasn’t as much of a crutch). I think by 1970 or so, US studios had 16-24 tracks. That alone wasn’t bad, but it did shift the focus to the engineer/producer as an auteur and in the process, a lot of the product were studio confabulations-- some sound great, but have less to do with the sound of the room and the energy that could be generated by musicians playing together at the same time.
Much also depends on the production choices.
Whether or not you like early Neil Young, for example, Harvest (particularly the early Lee Hulko-mastered copies if you can find an unmolested one), sound fabulous-- very much a ’live in the studio’ recording, though tracks were recorded in different places at different times. It has a very organic quality.
PS: I also like the music in this time window- very creative, went in a million directions, London and environs were an incubator at the time and a lot of the templates for a lot of different genres of popular music were formed in this period that I appreciate-- very heavy rock, psych folk, early prog rock, precursor bands to what eventually was labelled 'metal' (though no cookie monster vocals or shredding). I think the scene then shifted to the LA singer-songerwriter thing by the early '70s. A whole different kettle of fish. And there were some really over the top studios there that got refurbished for the new rock-pop era.