I'm not old enough to remember that stuff.

bitflipper
I'm not old enough to remember that stuff.

 
I'm pretty sure anyone who's old enough to have mastered for vinyl is not nostalgic for it. 

I would speculate this:
Vinyl recordings were not as loudness compressed as CD's have become.  Don't squish the crap out of the recording and leave lots of headroom.  More dynamic range is good.
Definitely center the low frequencies, which you should be doing anyway.  The biggest offenders are probably synths with L/R delays and what not.
 

Anderton
You can't really discuss mixing for vinyl without mastering for vinyl, because a lot of the success of the mastering depends on the mixing. But there are several "rules"...
 
Always remember that mixing or mastering for vinyl has to accommodate the process of dragging a rock through yards of plastic to reproduce sound. And people think digital audio is unnatural...
 
There are physical limits to how well a stylus can follow a groove. Too loud a track will literally cause the needle to jump out of the groove.
 
The longer the side, the lower the level. This is why 12" singles were good for dance - you could have it louder than if you had a bunch of songs crammed into the same amount of space.
 
It was best to divide up the music so the length of the two sides was as close as possible.
 
The inner grooves distort more, although this also has to do with turntables. You'd often put your softest songs last on a side for this reason.
 
Vinyl has a hard time handling low frequencies. Kick and bass should always be mixed to center. The stylus doesn't know what to do if there are different, big excursions on opposite sides of the groove (assuming stereo, of course)
 
Few people today realize how drastically the pre-emphasis and de-emphasis curves affect the recording. On playback, the RIAA curve boosts the low frequencies by +20dB and cuts high frequencies by -20dB. That's a lot of highs going into the cutter when mastering during the pre-emphasis part. So you don't want to make things too bright, but because those frequencies are going to be amplified big-time. Most mastering cuts off frequencies below 40-50Hz and above 10-16kHz for this reason.
 
Vinyl has a limited dynamic range. If you want to stay above the noise and below distortion, some judicious limiting and compression is helpful.
 
If you're going to put out a vinyl release, you HAVE to use a pro mastering engineer who has experience with vinyl and with cutting lathes. You HAVE to get an acetate for approval to make sure things ended up okay. And if you're going to do the mix, the process is fraught with peril. Most mastering engineers can process a mix to be vinyl-friendly, but it helps a whole lot if the mix is vinyl-friendly in the first place.

This is what I remember from the "golden age" of vinyl.  Before the days of having compressors on every track and bus, we had to manipulate dynamic levels by hand just to get a usable level for tape.  We used to  think that a dynamic range of 70 plus db's was good enough to mask the noise floor while giving the master tape room to breathe.  Now, we freak out if our dynamic range is less than 100 db's.  I remember vinyl records having a wider range from loud to soft than we have today, although we have the capability for far more range.  I'm glad that I don't have to mix or master for vinyl, anymore, but I suspect that within a very short time, technology will change the way we record and mix, yet again.  I can hardly wait! LOL

Interesting discussion. I have never had to deal with recording for vinyl but I have a friend that' recorded 15 albums. I called him up to discuss this thread and he confirmed a couple of things and told me a couple things I didn't know.
 
When putting a record together I'm told that it had to be planned carefully to ensure that loud, or bass/drum heavy tracks did not end up as the last tracks on a given side of the record because it could cause trouble for people that made the pressing master. Getting all the tracks to flow together in the proper track location was a big part of the mastering process. I guess it's not an issue today. Sounds to me like mastering is easier now.

Lynn
We used to  think that a dynamic range of 70 plus db's was good enough to mask the noise floor while giving the master tape room to breathe.  Now, we freak out if our dynamic range is less than 100 db's.  I remember vinyl records having a wider range from loud to soft than we have today, although we have the capability for far more range.  I'm glad that I don't have to mix or master for vinyl, anymore, but I suspect that within a very short time, technology will change the way we record and mix, yet again.  I can hardly wait! LOL

 
One of the interesting differences between digital and analog recording is that as a general rule, digital distorts more as you decrease levels, while analog distorts more as you increase levels.

ampfixer
When putting a record together I'm told that it had to be planned carefully to ensure that loud, or bass/drum heavy tracks did not end up as the last tracks on a given side of the record because it could cause trouble for people that made the pressing master. Getting all the tracks to flow together in the proper track location was a big part of the mastering process. I guess it's not an issue today. Sounds to me like mastering is easier now.

Yes, that's why I mentioned softer songs were often put last on a side. Mastering is indeed much easier now, but I think song order is still important...assuming anyone's still making albums and not just singles

soens
That and the fact that the center hole is never perfectly center causing the disk to wobble as it rotates ensuring that the needle will never be perfectly aligned in the grove no matter where it rests....

 
Technically, with all late 20th century record pressings, a record's center hole is always near-perfectly centered. The center hole punch is machined to attach very securely to the record press with an extremely small tolerance. The wobble happens because the metal parts used to press the record grooves (which are separate from the center hole punch) can and do shift during the pressing of the vinyl, and while those metal parts also have a tight specification, some are made with less attention to detail than others, resulting in a vinyl record that can display wobble.

What I remember , as a listener, is that albums that were pushing the time limit to the max ( 20min ??) per side had no bass content at all.
I was told that the reason was bass heavy tracks took up more space. So If a band insisted on a 20 min side the engineers had to cut the bass to make it fit.

Cactus Music
What I remember , as a listener, is that albums that were pushing the time limit to the max ( 20min ??) per side had no bass content at all.

 
And probably had lower levels, too.
 

I was told that the reason was bass heavy tracks took up more space. So If a band insisted on a 20 min side the engineers had to cut the bass to make it fit.

What makes sound with vinyl is a needle following a waveform excursion. Lower frequencies and higher levels meant a lot of motion for the stylus.