How old are you? I'm being serious and not trying to be insulting. If you are under 35 then a lot of things that were very common when I was young haven't been common since then. My 'Cheap Plastic' was lighter (thinner) vinyl records. This was real common for pop music- read "Rock and Roll"- from the early to mid 60's because record companies thought rock was a fad and would fade away. No point in producing higher quality albums for a fad.
The second factor in this was record players. Most of the kids I knew first had a mono player that, as likely as not, was in a small suitcase. Open the lid, plug the player in and listen to the single speaker. They didn't have easily replaceable needle cartridges and the tone arms weighed a lot, proportionately. Even when stereo equipment became more widely available cost was usually a big factor, so big and heavy tone arms with questionable quality needles were still the norm, unless you were an audiophile. Audiophiles are a small subset now and were probably an even smaller subset then. Most people wanted price first then convenience as long as the sound quality met a rather low threshold.
Combine thin vinyl with a heavy tone arm/needle and you have a nice record gouging machine, sometimes derisively called a record lathe. Yes I know that there are real record lathes and that they are part of the record manufacturing process, but the term was meant as an insult for these cheaper stereos. Most stereophonic equipment sold to people at that time was a one piece turntable/receiver combination, and probably did NOT have inputs for other playback devices like tapes or a separate turntable. This would have been the late 60's at least in my area. I live in the center of the country and at the time fads and products from the coasts might take a couple of years before they filtered into my state.
In the 70's things became modular, and it was possible to buy and upgrade pieces of your sound system one at a time. So you would buy a good amplifier, with at least a turntable and tape inputs but maybe more, and then maybe upgrade your speakers or buy a good turntable.
A good turntable. What defines a good turntable now? Whose cartridges are considered good and whose are considered inferior? Are belt driven turntables frowned upon now or preferred? It went back and forth for a while. I haven't been keeping up, because by the early 90's I was already mostly CD's. I thought my records sounded better, but CD's were smaller, harder to scratch, and 'the future'. But I didn't get rid of my records.
So that's what I mean when I say 'Cheap Vinyl'. Its a term from the late 60's and early70's that described a record that you would play only a few times before there were a lot of pops and clicks, even if you treated them well because of limitations with the quality of your equipment. With a good turntable and a modern cartridge these probably would still sound fine, but finding the original album from that time in good shape would be the challenge.
As far as records, I have 50 year old records that I have bought. I think I still have every 45 or LP that I ever purchased. Plus I had older siblings who passed down their records to me, so I've got a few albums from the late 50's to very early 60's from before I could possibly have bought them. In addition, I have now inherited a large collection of 78's that go all the way back to the 1920's. But these are made of out of shellac and not vinyl.
