HW RE: off into dodgy vinyl ness

[Captain Bl@ck]

By far the worst vinyl 'error' to my ears, at least, occurs when the disc is
pressed with the hole off- centre.  This lends the sound a slow cyclic wow
which can make the disc unlistenable to anyone with a sensitivity to pitch,
as I have.

Flicknife were a chief offender here, but there were others.

In fact I encountered so many records with this affliction, I used to use a
small file to enlarge the hole, and have some parallel lines drawn on the
turntable plinth to check for movement of the arm when playing.

Thankfully that's one problem that has been completely erradicated by CD.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Mather" <paul at GROMIT.DLIB.VT.EDU>
To: <BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET>
Sent: Tuesday, March 02, 2004 3:29 PM
Subject: Re: HW RE: off into dodgy vinyl ness


> On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 10:49:35AM -0000, David Dobbie wrote:
>
> => I was a Happy boy when I could afford a CD palyer, what a great
> => device. What a great signal to noise ratio, sounds so much better than
> => vinyl, which sounds dead in comparision, that is pure fact and not
> => just my opinion ;)
>
> Some of the earlier Hawkwind CD releases were awful---they sounded
> like they were taken straight from the vinyl masters, with RIAA phono
> equalisation left in and all.  As a consequence, they sounded terrible
> when played, at least compared to their vinyl counterparts.  Unless
> I'm misremembering, _Chronicle of the Black Sword_ springs to mind,
> here...
>
> Now that vinyl is a niche market, and pretty much a collector's
> medium, the new vinyl releases tend to be very well pressed, often
> using virgin vinyl.  I've not had the benefit of hearing any (my
> turntable is many, many miles away), but I'd imagine such audiophile
> pressings would sound superb.
>
> I'd heard that one of the contributors to awful vinyl sound quality
> (excessive crackles and surface noise, etc.) was the routine use of
> recycled vinyl and the use of poor, worn-out master discs when
> pressing.  (That's one reason to try and buy the initial release of an
> LP; you often get better quality.)  It didn't help much that Nth
> generation releases also sometimes used very poor master tapes as
> source.  I remember a low-priced Rush LP reissue I had that had
> unbearably high tape hiss, making me think they must've used the
> umpteenth copy of a safety master when going to re-press that one. :-(
>
> Cheers,
>
> Paul.
>
> e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu
>
> "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
>  deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
>         --- Frank Vincent Zappa