[Eliot Ness]

Vinyl had issues too.  A friend in the Air Force had a cheap stereo and a lot of records.  He got transferred to Italy and bought a very nice audio system, and since his record collection was back in the states, he bought some duplicate albums.  When he came back I borrowed some of his albums to record on my reel-to-reel, and some had both his older album along with the newer album he had purchased. 

When I ran a level check on some of the newer albums they sounded muddy, for lack of a better term.  When I put on the old copies that had been played on his cheap stereo they sound nice and crisp, except for the pops and crackles his cheap system put on them.  My guess is the record company used the pressing disks longer than they should have resulting in an inferior sounding album.  The sound was so bad I wound up using his older albums despite the pops and crackles.