Quote Originally Posted by jbangelfish
I guess I'll chalk it up to a bad example of what DG had to offer. If I'd known that it was pressed in 1960, I might have steered clear anyway. Things seemed to get a lot better in the 70's and 80's.
Bill
DG would have my unequivocal rave if not for that bad pressing of "Who's Next." They did comparable limited edition runs for other artists, but after that one defective record, I steered clear. The ECM records I bought not specifically because they were DG pressings, but because I was interested in their artists and DG was their contract manufacturer (they'd used Warner before, and the DG pressings were a huge step up in quality).

Sounds like you just got a worn out or very dirty record. You can't always tell what's actually in the grooves just by visual inspection. If there's a lot of embedded gunk, it'll sound bad regardless of how clean it looks on the surface. A few sweeps from a Discwasher can make the surface of a record look very polished if it didn't have a lot of surface abrasions. But, it won't do much for the sound if the gunk is deep into the grooves.

You might want to hunt out a local high end store that stocks record cleaning machines and see if they'll let you use it for a fee to clean that record. Some boutiquey used record stores also have their own high end record cleaning machines that they'll let customers use for a fee.

Otherwise, I think that LAST's deep cleaning fluid is probably the best affordable product out there for recovering really dirty records.