This was waiting for me when I got back from my epic road trip — the first volume of the complete recordings of Blind Willie McTell on vinyl being issued by Jack White’s label Third Man Records. The vinyl version of Dylan’s new box set Another Self Portrait was waiting here, too, but I thought it would be a good idea to spin Willie first, to work my way into the Dylan.
This album sounds great, a quiet pressing on 180-gram vinyl — just what you’d expect from Jack.
Cigarettes is my ruin, whiskey is my crave —
Some of these pretty women gonna send me to my grave.
New vinyl pressing quality is out of this world now. You don’t even have to think about it anymore. You know it will be good.
Not invariably true, alas — some modern pressing plants have lower quality control standards than others, and labels can’t always book the best ones all the time — but the improvement in the general quality of vinyl pressings today is really staggering.
I’ve yet to run into a bad modern pressing. Maybe just lucky, but they have all been outstanding for me.
I’ve had good luck, too, with some exceptions. There were lots of problems reported with the new vinyl edition of the Beatles albums, for example — I got a set that was mostly pristine but with one bad pressing in the lot. The issue here was apparently that the label had to do such a big run of albums that it didn’t have much choice in what pressing plants to use — it had to settle for whatever ones could get the work done in the time allotted. Quality control suffered, it seems.
I can see that. Most of the new vinyl I purchase seems to be limited to a few thousand pressings so the quality seems to be consistent and high for those I have gotten.
Yes, exactly, Paul — the boutique labels can pick and choose the best pressing plants, because their runs are small.