Excellent sounding LPs

+1, @ghdprentice 

The emphasis should always be on building a well-balanced system. That’s what truly allows you to get the most out of any playback format or component. 

20% sound "Great" with the caveat that "great" just compares favorably with a "good/great" sounding streamed song or album and that there are many more examples of "outstanding" digital records that far out perform the best vinyl recordings imo. 

So, now here's the gist as to why I don't play vinyl much anymore. I too assembled a vinyl and entire system setup that allowed vast majority of albums, not just audiophile recordings to provide very nice sound quality. And so, from that standpoint and the physical condition of albums sound quality just fine. The issue is vast majority of my 3k albums nothing special as far as hot stampers or engineered especially well. Many are likely later  generation stampers,  many likely copied from later generation masters, some probably copied from safety masters. In other words these recordings don't come close to revealing sound quality of original recordings. I started noticing this more and more as my digital setups increased in quality, many recordings began to be challenged by equal or superior sound quality  from my digital setups. And then streams and cd's were more often being remastered from first generation masters, many more vinyl albums left in dust by superior streams and cd's. So now we arrive at today where I prefer streams and cd rips sound quality vs many of my albums, vinyl rig sits unused. And then I'll repeat myself by saying I now prefer listening to music on random play or stream of conscious choice where only one cut per album likely to be played.

Since records (and CDs to a much lesser extent) vary so widely in SQ I can’t see how anyone with a very large collection can honestly say the vast percentage sound excellent.

The Vintage Vinyl sound quality varied wildly, and it requires a lot of research, time, & sometimes money to get the best Vinyl.   The first vinyl pressings are always the most desirable, and for Rock, whether the Albums were first pressed in the UK or USA sometimes makes a big difference.  Researching on Hoffmans site and the Discogs site can help you identify the best pressings for your favorite specific vintage albums.  So, it is quite challenging to get a "First pressing", "mint", vintage album which will sound like the artist is in your room. 

Many of the UK bands delivered dup master tapes to the USA for Vinyl creation which ended up very inferior to the UK albums.  Some examples are Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, & Jethro Tull, Aqualung, which was an actual dispute with the Artist and "nobody" got the master tape.  The Master Tape was only used on the latest "Reissue" which is the best sounding version of Aqualung. 

As another example, here is a picture of my best "First Pressing" UK, Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland.  You can see the original numbers crossed out in the wax whch helps identify it as a first pressing. This first pressing was actually mixed by Hendrix and sounds different than all other versions. Instruments are more upfront, sound moving from channel to channel in the middle of a riff, etc...  This first pressing had such high dynamic range (peaks and valleys in the grooves) that the cheap record players of the time would skip, which caused them to reduce the dynamic range on the next pressings.  In addition, when the tapes were delivered the the USA, they could not understand Hendrix instructions on the mix, so, the USA versions have a non-Hendrix mix. 

Since the master tapes degrade over time which hurts the reissues and remasters, some of these "mint" first pressings are the best you will ever hear from your favorite artist.

Note:  Some of the "Super Disks", "Half Speed Masters" from back in the day were also exceptional.  For example, Van Morrison, Moondance, and a couple of the Heart Albums.