Excellent sounding LPs

A vinyl collection with a vast variety of music genres including Jazz/Vocal/Classical and Opera can easily achieve 25% Audiophile SQ without "cherry-picking" SQ over content. The near Audiophile SQ is much more subjective, due to one’s grading standards and genre biases. Personally my goal is to reach 33% Audiophile status and 66% near Audiophile SQ without choosing SQ over content. The bottom line is we are all prisoners to the recording quality. No system has the ability to change that(98%+ lol) but we can still control the amount of vinyl dreck in our collection.

@hjdca points out a single instance of possible inferior pressing. So many of my vintage rock pressings lacking in resolution, transparency, bass, dynamics. And its not my vinyl or general system at fault, the good pressings or remastered vinyl is just fine in all areas. 

“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.”

@rvpiano 

This is where it really pays to ask yourself — are you an impulsive buyer or do you take time to consider the two most important factors of any album: provenance and mastering? In my experience, carefully weighing those two before purchasing makes all the difference between an average recording and one that truly shines.

A lot of London/Decca classical recordings are quite good.  

Vinyl resurgence, nostalgia, rose tinted glasses. Do people really think the recording companies gave a  damn about sound quality back in the day! They churned out the vinyl from a single stamper way past it's past due date, didn't care about what masters copies came from. And this not only with rock releases, I have plenty of rather pedestrian sounding  classical, jazz, pop vinyl to prove it. 

Some claim vinyl era was golden age of audio recordings, I totally disagree. While the masses played vinyl at home, they didn't care about sound quality and the record companies provided the requisite product. While sound quality still not an issue for the masses, just in sheer numbers audiophiles much larger cohort than in so called 'golden age', therefore, we now have many more providers offering high quality sound, where there's a market some will come to serve. 

The ironic thing is these vintage recordings often offer much better sound quality than previously thought now that we have providers seeking out and offering us recordings made from original or high quality masters. Whether that is provided digitally or analog is of no consequence anymore for me and many others. The issue is  all this made much of my vintage vinyl obsolete.