It has been interesting to see albums come back. The old record pressing equipment has been refurbished and upgraded and the record quality has improved greatly with improved materials and sensors and other modern manufacturing improvements applied.
actually....not at all. New records are still coming out, but stuff pressed in 1990's or earlier is still the best. So much knowledge, experience and machinery has been lost.
A lot of new records are pressed from digital sources, which kind of makes it a moot point. There are a bunch of labels that have found old equipment that had been sitting idle since the '90s -- Pirates Press for example found pressing machines in the Czech Republic and press a ton of records, and offer pressing services to other labels. I've talked to a buddy here in Mexico who has a pretty decent sized label about trying to track down pressing machines here in Mexico. In the '70s and '80s there were tons of Mexican labels pressing stuff that simply no longer exist, and the machines have to be somewhere. There are also companies making new record pressing machines (in Germany, or at least that's one of them).
Record Store Day is a blessing and a curse. Major labels clog the pressing plants with things like 180-gram repressings of Supertramp's "Breakfast in America" or Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" -- both 99-cent records, widely available. They pressed a million of Adele's record. But it means that new, good music from smaller labels gets pushed back, making release dates a year or more after the recording and mixing is done. (maybe I should switch this to the "5hit that pisses me off" thread...)
And then you have the millenials who buy records not to listen to them but as an "investment." Jeebus.
I worked at a record store in Seattle from '88 to ยด97, had bought records before, held on to mostly everything, and continue to buy new and old stuff today. Dunno if this fascination with records is gonna stick around, but I would be happy to see it die back down a little.
