Even if you don't have a great musical ear, it's easy to hear the noise type and level of vinyl by listening to the run-out grooves. Whatever you hear there exists under all the music as well.
But that isn't even the last word. What you really care about signal to noise ratio. You can put a recording on quiet vinyl and still have a worse S/N ratio if the producers crammed too much time on the side and sacrificed signal level to do it, which was not uncommon. This was a bigger issue with classical recordings because the music doesn't always divide into convenient chunks for ~18 minute sides, but pop/rock groups also occasionally had their reasons for wanting to push the times up on their releases.