Nice pic of Audacity! That's a cool program, even running in Windows.
I kind of disagree with some of this guys. Compression is as old as the hills, and was used on FM radio way, way back.
I can recall always reading the record reviews in High Fidelity magazine - strictly because they always included a second measure of "recording quality." More often than not, it had to do with compression or the lack of it - resulting in a good quality LP.
The quality of the vinyl pressing sometimes entered into it, but most of the time, that wasn't the problem. The original tape had much more quality than the production versions, but the degradation was not completely because of copying. There was a conscious effort by some to compress it into a smaller range of frequencies in the post-processing work.
Speeding up the mastering needle, copying to another tape and pushing it well into/over saturation were some of the tricks, I believe. Certainly, these days it's much easier - therefore, it happens more often.
