Mosh I am sure there were other series of pressings that were very good. Talking about pressings that was one area where there were some serious inconsistencies. As you have mentioned earlier.
 
Being in Australia was a big disadvantage in many cases. We often got a much worse pressing compared to the imported records that were being pressed. One of my first experiences was with Santana's Abraxas. Here in Australia the quality of the pressing was just bad and I mean bad. It sounded terrible. It must have been off some very poor quality tape dub or something. I just thought that was the way it was until I heard an imported copy of it and it sounded way better.
 
Thank god a good friend of mine actually set up an import record store in Canberra Australia at the time and only sold imported pressings. That was all I bought once that happened.
 
That is one of the things about CD's that is great. Any pressing is the same quality everywhere. I have also been through the process of producing albums for clients too back in the day and sending off the two track master and getting test pressings back and then comparing them to the two track master. Often they were much worse and you had to keep giving the mastering engineers instructions and getting new test pressings back until it sounded better etc.. None of that now either with CD's. Just send off the master and it comes back perfect every time.

Jeff Evans
That is one of the things about CD's that is great. Any pressing is the same quality everywhere. I have also been through the process of producing albums for clients too back in the day and sending off the two track master and getting test pressings back and then comparing them to the two track master. Often they were much worse and you had to keep giving the mastering engineers instructions and getting new test pressings back until it sounded better etc.. None of that now either with CD's. Just send off the master and it comes back perfect every time.

But interestingly there are sometimes a number of different masterings - and I'm talking outside of the heavily promoted "remastered" reissues designed to get people to buy the same CD again.
 
Check out all the different versions of Pink Floyd CD's released in the US:
 
http://pinkfloydarchives.com/DUSCDPF.htm
 

Or this type of different mastering... *Sigh...*
 

drewfx1
 
But interestingly there are sometimes a number of different masterings - and I'm talking outside of the heavily promoted "remastered" reissues designed to get people to buy the same CD again.
 
Check out all the different versions of Pink Floyd CD's released in the US:
 
http://pinkfloydarchives.com/DUSCDPF.htm
 

All the big bands had this problem. The Beatles as well as the Rolling Stones ... and each pressing was always different in some way, however minimal it might be.
 
The MP3 thing has helped some, however, if the copy is made of a 3rd or 4th generation something, you are back to the same story.
 
I don't know of any bands that were not affected by this, until the days of digital releases by the bands themselves when they can have better, and more, control over their own work.

i think rundgren produced one of the longest playing discs back in the day....
at the cost of a certain amount of fidelity,
which i guess he deemed as not as important.
 
he was kinda ahead of the curve from the get go

Interesting. I could go on and on about different things in the debate for analog or digital but it's hard to describe some things so I submit for your consideration 2 examples:
 
This is specifically for the recordings of The Pretenders - "Middle of The Road"

 
At around 2:28 of the song she counts the measures starting at 1 and goes to 8. On very good equipment, at the around the year of the recording, you could hear her count to 8 (yes she does count to 8).
 
With the vinyl in ~good condition, medium turntable (~$300), medium stylus and shell (~$100) and a
JVC home theater system, I can get almost to 7. (I know it's there and it seems like I can hear it but may be imagining it).
 
The same amp and speakers wit the CD, a variety of wavs, mp3s and the best I can get is 3.
 
My point being that even with the same system, a mediocre vinyl medium shows that something is missing from the digital copies. Perhaps the vinyl was pressed with a hotter recording. shrugs
 
I was one of the first to jump on digital when the first cd players were sold. I love the portability and hardiness (ie CD's) of the digital mediums. I know the tech behind digital and analog and can't explain it but I know something is not there in the digital formats.

DrLumen
Interesting. I could go on and on about different things in the debate for analog or digital but it's hard to describe some things so I submit for your consideration 2 examples:
 
This is specifically for the recordings of The Pretenders - "Middle of The Road"

 
At around 2:28 of the song she counts the measures starting at 1 and goes to 8. On very good equipment, at the around the year of the recording, you could hear her count to 8 (yes she does count to 8).
 
With the vinyl in ~good condition, medium turntable (~$300), medium stylus and shell (~$100) and a
JVC home theater system, I can get almost to 7. (I know it's there and it seems like I can hear it but may be imagining it).
 
The same amp and speakers wit the CD, a variety of wavs, mp3s and the best I can get is 3.
 
My point being that even with the same system, a mediocre vinyl medium shows that something is missing from the digital copies. Perhaps the vinyl was pressed with a hotter recording. shrugs
 
I was one of the first to jump on digital when the first cd players were sold. I love the portability and hardiness (ie CD's) of the digital mediums. I know the tech behind digital and analog and can't explain it but I know something is not there in the digital formats.

 
What's not there with digital is high frequencies that can't be heard and orders of magnitude higher levels of noise, distortion, time based errors and mystical imaginary stuff.
 
Unless you are comparing identical sources under tightly controlled double blind conditions, anything you think you heard is pretty much irrelevant and you don't know anything - at best you believe things based on an unreliable subjective evaluation.
 
And lots of people claim to understand the technical stuff when in fact they often completely misunderstand it. But they believe they really do understand it because they've read incorrect explanations repeatedly over and over again.
 
And no one who really understands the technical stuff would ever make any claims whatsoever regarding audibility that didn't come from carefully controlled objective testing.
 
And by some amazing coincidence, almost none of the unexplainable stuff that people know they can hear ever holds up under careful double blind testing.
 
It is what it is.

Having an electronics background, I do know the tech behind digital and analog. When I test/experiment with identical conditions with the only variable being the source - an album or an mp3, I know what my ears are telling me.
 
However, say what you think you know.

I suspect the vanishing count is due to increased compression with each subsequent remaster, rather than being attributable to some fundamental difference between an analog vs. digital recording.
 
Simply converting to a digital format alone should not result in any audible loss of information. But nearly every analog recording that's ever been re-released on CD has been remastered. They could do that transparently, but record companies can't resist doing a little "modern" squashing at the same time.

DrLumen
Having an electronics background, I do know the tech behind digital and analog. When I test/experiment with identical conditions with the only variable being the source - an album or an mp3, I know what my ears are telling me.
 
However, say what you think you know.

 
In my case, I don't have to say what I think I know. My knowledge is based on objective evidence that is consistently reproducible - with consistent results from a variety of different types of objective tests and measurements - and it holds up under scrutiny.
 
If you think you can hear things in a format (vinyl) with not just higher noise levels, but many times higher noise levels than CD, it's almost certainly because you made a mistake in testing or tested two different things. 
 
You said yourself you couldn't explain it (and claim to be technically knowledgeable), and your results don't match what theory predicts, what quantitative measurements tells, and they aren't consistent with the results of careful double blind objective tests done by others.
 
We don't throw out all of that other stuff because you make a claim where you didn't even explain how you know the vinyl and CD came from the same source and didn't explain the test conditions in detail. 
 
And the faith you have in your ears is perhaps a sign that you aren't aware of just how unreliable they are. I know I don't trust mine at all in any kind of casual testing.