Why, oh why, does vinyl continue to blow away digital?
- Thread starter godofwealth
- Start date
I'll rotate my Mac mini and see what happens!Sounds like crosstalk, try adjusting azimuth
If it is ~2 seconds off (60/33.3) then it is the neighbouring groove.
This is why Direct Metal cuts have some appeal… especially when the groves are close together
There is some plowing happening during the cut that is deforming adjacent to the cut and pushing over to the next groove.
This is why Direct Metal cuts have some appeal… especially when the groves are close together
There is some plowing happening during the cut that is deforming adjacent to the cut and pushing over to the next groove.
It’s most probably a tape print through as @Audiohertz2 mentioned. Tapes are stored as tails out. It means a print through will be a pre echo rather than a post echo which is more annoying.
I heard pre echo due to tape print through on many AAD cds.
Last edited:
That's an interesting thought. I always assumed the pre-echo was caused by the formation of the adjacent groove, which means there should be both pre echo and post echo on parts of the recording, since there is a pre and post groove directly adjacent most of the time. I found some posts on other forums that suggested the cutting of the groove distorts the adjacent grooves enough for a small amount of sound to leak through. The cartridge azimuth could potentially effect hearing one more than the other, I suppose, especially if the upper part of the groove closer to the record's surface gets more of the effect than down deeper in the groove.I mean if your turntable is playing with a "pre-echo"
That's good to know. Somehow I had never noticed it before except on LP, where it can be quite pronounced, and may be because of the groove cutting effect. If it was both print through and "groove through" you'd think you'd hear two pre-echoes, because they wouldn't be at the same time. Anybody ever heard that? If not, it's probably just tape print through. I've never confirmed that I could hear a post echo on LP.
Digitally this could be relatively easy to largely eliminate by superimposing and timing the pre-echo against the recording but out of phase. Might be easier said than done, but it should work since it's not random noise. Heck, it could even be done analog!
Tape print through is hard to notice on vinyl because of the surface noise and being low in level. On the other side pre echo due to loud adjacent groove is more prominent but it is possible to hear both pre echoes on vinyl.
With the help of nice headphones I've heard tape print through on cassettes I recorded from cds back in the day.
It seems a little faster than that, more like 1 second. You can hear it at about 56 seconds on the Youtube video, the quick flute scale after the silence.
I'm learning a lot about pre -echo from grooves and tape print through, but this doesn't do much to answer why some find more goodness in the sound of vinyl. For those who prefer vinyl, does this preference hold as much to mono recordings as it does to stereo? The reason I ask is that it has occurred to me that with a stereo cartridge an interesting effect occurs. There is some inevitable cross feed between the channels, and it is reverse polarity. I don't know if it's loud enough to have an effect, but if you've ever tried mixing the opposite channels attenuated and reverse polarity, the effects are pretty interesting.
I just did a quick experiment using Audacity to listen to reverse polarity cross feed. It definitely has an audible effect that I can notice immediately at -16 dB. Cartridges I think have crossfeed between -20 to -30 dB. At -16 dB on headphones I liked the crossfeed. It made the sound less hard, gave it a little more atmosphere. At -23 dB I can still hear it, and it's a little softer and sweeter than with it turned off.
This does nothing to explain why some prefer reel to reel.
I just did a quick experiment using Audacity to listen to reverse polarity cross feed. It definitely has an audible effect that I can notice immediately at -16 dB. Cartridges I think have crossfeed between -20 to -30 dB. At -16 dB on headphones I liked the crossfeed. It made the sound less hard, gave it a little more atmosphere. At -23 dB I can still hear it, and it's a little softer and sweeter than with it turned off.
This does nothing to explain why some prefer reel to reel.
Last edited:
Maybe that “tape print through” causal mechanism has some merit.
There is no way I can conjure cart alignment to be the cause.