Clear vinyl vs. regular black vinyl

Donald Fagen was a fanatic about the recording and production process and I seem to remember them saying there was some advantage to them producing Sunken Condos on clear vinyl. It is also a unique record in that it only has music on 3 sides, which is of course better as the music doesn't go as far into the center of each disc where the distortion is maximal from the angle change of the arm to the record. They could have squeezed it onto one record (barely) I belleve or cut a minute somewhere.

I doubt he made this record this way to cut costs. Any music/pressing people out there?

"Carbon has conductive properties, so adding it to the PVC increases the overall conductivity of the material, lessening the accumulation of static, and therefore, dust, on a record."

See: Furnace Record Pressing.

There ya go. I guess sometimes the simplest answers are the right one. Now I am going to have to get the multimeter out and see if it is true.

I like clear vinyl but it's almost impossible to see imperfections.

@cleeds -True that. If you read the papers from RCA back in the day, the carbon black also concealed what was referred to as "plate out" issues, which I took to mean various problems caused by compound under heat of pressing. I’m not sure there was enough carbon black in the records to really reduce static, but I prefer a standard black record for the reason @slaw cited- namely, I can see the record surface better. Yeah, I know the Clarity in theory doesn’t have the sonic compromises attributable to normal vinyl compounds, but having compared them on the same record, the difference, while noticeable, is not that significant to me. FWIW, the fellow who did a lot of work for RCA in the ’70s and whose name is on some the patents, is Khanna. (or the phonetic equivalent).