How did Klaus sound?
I thought he sounded fantastic. I don't think he really started to lose a step vocally until the 2000's. It is amazing how much power, clarity, and range the man maintained for so long.
I was a bit late to the game with them in general. I was vaguely aware of them during the Blackout era, but that was when I was first really starting to get into hard rock, and I hadn't heard enough of them to really gravitate toward them yet. But then when the video for Rock You Like a Hurricane dropped, my reaction was basically "Whoa!
This is AMAZING!" From there, I was hooked. Through that album cycle, I really got into Love at First Sting and Blackout. World Wide Live introduced me to some of the more prominent tracks from Love Drive and Animal Magnetism as well. I didn't really go back much further than that though, partly because there was so much of their discography, and partly because of just my aversion at the time to anything '70s. I thought Savage Amusement was pretty good. Crazy World was just okay. But Face the Heat was on par with some of their best stuff. After that, they lost me. So my "sweet spot" for them is the Jabs era through Face the Heat, basically.