Its not the recording. If it was the recording then it would be on every copy of every LP ever made. If it was the recording it would be on reissues. It would for that matter be on the CDs! Its not the recording. Its the pressing.
Its quality control all right but its way more than that. The short version of the story is you take any production run of any record from any stamper cut by any mastering engineer and the great majority will be average, with a lot of below average copies with noise and sibilance and just generally crappy sounding, and with a really incredibly good sounding copy coming off every once in a while.
Early original pressings tend to be better. Reissues tend to be a whole lot worse. But these are tendencies, and there are exceptions. Still, by and large, reissues suck.
And yeah, those Ronstadt/Riddle recordings were all mastered by Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab and sound fab!
Its quality control all right but its way more than that. The short version of the story is you take any production run of any record from any stamper cut by any mastering engineer and the great majority will be average, with a lot of below average copies with noise and sibilance and just generally crappy sounding, and with a really incredibly good sounding copy coming off every once in a while.
Early original pressings tend to be better. Reissues tend to be a whole lot worse. But these are tendencies, and there are exceptions. Still, by and large, reissues suck.
And yeah, those Ronstadt/Riddle recordings were all mastered by Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab and sound fab!