One thing I will generally say about the CDs issued by labels like AS Disc, LYS, Hunt, Arkadia - and there are many, many others - is they did very, very little filtering of the original source material that they had. You may indeed have had to tolerate some very poor sound, but personally this is much better than the very over-compensated search for a perfect sound model we get today - even on old recordings. There have been in recent years - and I won't name the labels - some bad examples of remastering, even of Koussevitzky performances, compared with efforts back in the late 1980s.
DG, incidentally, used to stuff a foam layer (to prevent the CDs scratching if they fell off the spool) in their double CD cases back in the 1980s/1990s. People are only in recent years starting to discover that these, too, are making discs unplayable.
I'm certainly no dinosaur, but there was a lot wrong with LPs, but it seems much less wrong with them than we would ever get to experience with CDs, let alone the digital revolution that was to follow that one.
Yes, bronzing was certainly a problem with many smaller CD companies of the late 1980s and 1990s. I should specify that my copies of these particular AS Discs never bronzed and still play perfectly. I can't imagine that more than one batch of them was ever pressed, so I would think other copies of them would also remain playable.
I fear that our society is becoming less and less interested in long-term preservation of historical material. As long as I can enjoy it today, I don't care whether I (or anyone else) will be able to play it in 20 years' time. Vinyl (as long as it was never played!) was more stable than CD, CD than CD-R, and so on.
The publishing house Eisenbrauns once posted a superb April Fools' Day piece demonstrating that the ideal medium for long-term data storage was ancient Mesopotamian baked clay tablets. Durability 4000+ years, far exceeding paper, let alone computer files and other current media; preservation unimpaired by flood, and actually improved by fire; etc., etc. It added up to a remarkably strong case! Not, unfortunately, a medium that would be much help in the long-range preservation of Koussevitzky.
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