LP's... Do they sound better now than 30 yrs ago?

The trends in competing album formats from the late '60s to the early 90s could explain varying levels of wear and tear on original LPs. From the '50s to the '70s, a needle in a groove was by far the dominant format for personal music, and it shows when you look at original pressings at thrift shops. There were even record players for cars and for kids in this era.

In the '60s LPs had increasing competition from 8-tracks, Album Oriented Rock (AOR) format was introduced in 1967 and continues to the present. Cassettes quickly replaced the 8-tracks in the '70s and became dominant all the way into the '90s. In 1990, cassette sales in the US were still at 442 million units. That may partially explain why my 1980s 99-cent thrift shop LPs sound so good (but it's also obvious that the recording and mastering quality was generally better by then).

So my point is, playing 45s and LPs were the dominant format for playing music in the '50s and '60s. By the late '60s through the '90s, 8-track, cassette, and AOR variously competed for playback, no doubt reducing the wear on pop LPs from those decades.

Having been in the consumer electronics business my entire carrier and an executive for a couple of major A/V tape manufacturers for a good chunk of that time, I had a unique perspective  on the shift from analogue audio and video tape to the digital world as CD and other digital formats started to ramp up and eventually pretty much killing the analogue tape business.  As this happened, a number of the big manufacturers of LP's started to slow down and ultimately shut down their operations.  There were many of these with WAMO (Warner Records) in Scranton Pa. being one of the biggest.  As these operations shut down their pressing plants tried to sell their pressing equipment, but eventually pretty much gave it away to anybody who would show up with a truck and haul it away.  A few smaller companies figured that the vinyl business was going off a cliff, but would not completely go away due to the massive amount of record players 'in the field'.  They kind of had the idea to be 'the last man in the buggy whip business'.  The most notable of these companies was/is a company called Rainbow Records in the Los Angeles area.  They picked up a ton of presses and associated equipment to put on line or cannibalize for spare parts.
  A previous responder noted that the quality of pressings had deteriorated over the years.  The dirty little secret about that was that for many years manufacturers pressed 'thick' discs and utilized virgin vinyl in the pressing process.  For production savings, eventually discs started to be pressed thinner (causing increased warping and a number of other problems).  What really had an effect however was when some pressing plants hit on the idea (driven by the record companies relentless quest for cost savings in a steadily shrinking market) of utilizing substantial amounts of 'regrind' vinyl sourced from unsold discs returned from retailers as well as 'in plant' pressing defects. Needless to say the introduction of foreign contaminants as the discs were cut from their album covers, piled up somewhere and eventually melted down was substantial.  I should also mention that in most cases the LP disc labels were left on the discs to be melted down with everything else.  The feeling was that most of the contaminants would be 'melted out' of the vinyl and since they would be adding a good percentage of virgin vinyl to the mix, nobody would notice.  Well, I think everybody (at least the audiophiles) did.
  Rainbow being one of the few people left in the game (I'm sure there are others, but I knew these guys) did some very good things due to a lack of price competition and requests from their somewhat 'picky' customers.  They went back to pressing thick discs and utilize the best quality virgin vinyl available, no regrind.  I also understand their cooling process is a little longer to allow the disc to harden up better in the mold.  ANYWAY, discs being manufactured today in the U.S.A. are probably some of the best quality discs that have been manufactured in the last 25 years or so.  Be thankful that the few remaining manufacturers in the vinyl disc business are (at least from my viewpoint) stressing quality of their product.

I'm not so sure Rainbow has much to crow about, cast your mind back to the recent Beatles Stereo Lp re-issue program. The complaints about the problems from the Rainbow pressings vs the European ones pressed at Optimal tarred Rainbow as a 2nd rate pressing facility. (I'm not sure if they have upgraded their QC recently, but quality was not often used in the same sentence).

I wish there was a like button for some of these posts!  Also +1 for the cleaning and for the ultra sonic with vacuum cleaning.