Vinyl Record Gooves and Needle

i don't know why you would think it's not full bandwidth. it is. actually vinyl has a wider bandwidth than 44.1 digital. there's all kinds of stuff going on at 25K or higher .. even if we don't hear it, the harmonics and sound pressure contribute to the listening experience. l. it is also analog ...remember the lollipop graph ... all those spots in between each instance of sampling where information is lost? not so with vinyl. is process. it's an analogous process.

no one says vinyl is perfect .. yes there is a pre emphasis and a de- emphasis process but that is really no better or worse / different than n/r schemes like dolby or dbx or dithering and other brick wall filters employed in digital.

none of it is perfect. it's just different. i prefer the sound of analog but i live in a digital world. so i use digital gear when i have to but at home if i have the choice of an LP or a CD i'll go with the record.

 

Well I think you've made a valid point. You weren't going to get the same fideltiy out of a Monkey Wards turn table and speakers as you would if you were using higher caliber stuff made by companies like Alpine, Rockford Fostgate, etc.

I remember my room mate in college had an Alpine TT with a Macintosh Amp and Blaupunkt speakers. I think he paid more for the stylus on that TT than his first semester's tuition. LOL

We dropped the needle on Revolver and it sounded fantastic. A few years later, I heard Revolver on CD and there were people screaming about how great it sounded. To my ears, it didn't come close to sounding as good as it did when I heard it on that nice TT back in my dorm room at Kent State. Yeah, it was "clean"... but there was no warmth, no silk.

So yeah, you do have to compare apples to apples.

fwiw
-d.

 

Found this on Ebay...

The Beatles Rubber Soul 1965 LP Record Parlophone England Pressing NMINT RARE | eBay

Although why someone would pull a record out and set it down without its dust jacket is beyond me. Rookie.

 

Additionally, that Rubber Soul record is not an original release - it's a re-issue from the 70s or later.

I've been scanning eBay for an original British vinyl pressing of Revolver - I have a bid in on one right now. But I also made the mistake of buying one of the new re-mastered vinyl re-issues of Revolver. It looked like a good idea, but I didn't do my research - the latest vinyl re-issues of The Beatles catalog are mastered from digital masters of the original master tapes. It was disappointing to realize that what I essentially purchased was a record made from a CD! facepalm

 

I found this interesting in the wiki article you linked to...

" Many Telarc classical LP's began the music near the end of the lead-in groove to avoid pre-echo (caused by wide groove modulations following a number of closely spaced silent grooves)..."

I didn't know that. Hah! Some friggin' audiophile I am.


And Telarc was from my home town, btw. I rented them a DAT machine in 198? - I was the first in the area to own one, they didn't have one, so I rented them mine once. Think I charged them $50. LOL


I was always under the impression that pre-echo was caused by storing tapes improperly - "heads out" - which could cause "print through" on the adjacent layers of tape over time, which is why we always fast forwarded the tape to the take up reel for storage, to avoid this audio anomaly.

Yes friends and neighbors, the kid is still learning new things everyday. Even about old stuff.

 

Perhaps the "whale-oil issue" is one of the reasons the Japanese vinyls sound 'better'. They have had no restrictions for many years on harvesting whales.

 

I never quite understood how 2 signals were fit into 1 groove. So I went looking and found this, which is very enlightening...

How to pack a stereo signal in one record groove

I was surprised to see it's a strict L/R thing. I'd assumed it was a sum/difference sort of encoding.

 

It's a different cause. On a disc, the pre-echo is caused by the ridges between the grooves being mechanically distorted slightly by what's in the next track, a bit like hearing neighbours through the walls. With a tape, as you know, it's the adjacent layers of tape magnetizing the next.

 

It's either, depending on your reference axes. If you are viewing it as horizontal-vertical, the horizontal component is the sum of the signals (the mono component) and the vertical is the difference, similar to mid-side microphone encoding. That's how stereo discs could be played (and wrecked) using a mono pickup cartridge. If you view the groove by tilting your head to a 45 degree angle, what you see as the horizontal is either the L or the R stereo signal and the vertical is the other, depending on your direction of view.

 

Thanks for the clarification, Bos.

 

This is actually the "tech" that I find most intriguing. I'm a little young for it, but I have vinyl, and I have turntables. I started off messing around as a DJ and fell in love with it, the vinyl especially. And I like sampling them etc. I have pretty much all of Led Z's stuff, Aerosmith's younger days, all stuff inherited from my father.

But CD's...I understand how they work. MP3, Wav, tapes, 8 tracks...I'm not saying I could make them...but I understand how they work.

But how we can put a very fine needle, that rides these very small grooves, connect that needle to an amplifying cone (horn) and I can hear a band, that someone else recorded, from those few rudimentary elements...it blows my mind. I even know the evolution of the record player....and it still blows my mind.

From what I understand, the bandwidth argument is kind of just an idle topic for discussion. The bandwidth can be higher, but the noise floor is also much higher. I'd rather stick with a noise-less 20-20k for fidelity. But I love me some vinyl.

That photo in interesting to me, because I use scratch needles a fair bit. After a while, you wear both the needle out, and the vinyl....but now I can visualize why that's happening, even with such a delicate needle and light balance the degradation is fairly quick.

One of the most fun musical tools (imo) to come out in my life time was Final Scratch, Traktor, etc type programs. I don't care who you are, if someone shows you how to use it....it's a blast.

Incidentally, this guy is a legend in the scratch game. Beyond a legend at this point. Imo, the best to ever do it, and he's.........CANADIAN!

Scratch Bastid Doobie Brothers mix (They make this look SO easy....this is very difficult)

 

If you were mastering using a variable-pitch lathe and a good cutter such as a Westrex 3D or a Neumann, the maximum LPI (lines per inch) would be set to minimize adjacent groove distortion...typically this max was around 250 to 300 lpi depending on the material being mastered. Note that the cutting amplifiers could deliver around 75 watts (or more) to each channel of the cutter head...one can actually hear the cutter head "singing" as the master is being made. The probability is higher that groove distortion occurs during the plating and pressing processes...and most likely the pressing process. It was important to get a master plated as soon as it came off the lathe since the lacquer starts drying immediately....

When you think about the precision process involving the mastering, plating, and pressing, quality control is needed all through these processes. RCA tried to "cheapen up" the vinyl with the "floppy" dynaflex LP's...filler added to some vinyl affected the signal to noise of finished LP's, etc. A good hot stylus master should get around 60 db signal to noise if not somewhat better, but certainly not 96 db like 16 bit digital.

 

Good to have that detail. The original point of the post was that pre-echo on vinyl discs happened mostly in the production process, whereas with tape it occured over time as the reels were being stored.

You can sometimes hear two different types of pre-echo when playing a vinyl disc re-issue where an old master tape was used to make a new disc master.