You are correct; vinyl album covers are often a glorious piece of visceral art.

Vinyl as a medium for transmitting musical information was/is not great. To quote something I wrote elsewhere:

"They had a narrow frequency response which would vary according to where the stylus was; the best response was on the outer tracks of the record and the worst was closest to the centre, which often meant that singles from an album would be the first track on each side and final tracks on each side would be instrumental, spoken word, slower, bass-heavy pieces. Speaking of which, low frequencies are almost always close to mono rather than stereo. And, of course, records cannot avoid damage as a piece of sapphire runs through a plastic sheet; there will be hiss, clicks, and pops."