Randy Scouse Vinyl

Got new speakers today and that got me thinking that I need to replace my stylus. Everytime I replace my stylus, the improvement in sound quality always surprises me. If you use your vinyl collection, you need to replace the stylus every few years. If we don't, they'll stop making them. Albums still sound better to me on records than on CDs though less so than 15 years ago.

Anyway, thinking about this made me amazed at the technology involved as compared to a compact disc player. Yes, the technology is mindblowing in a turntable. All a CD deck does is use a laser to read binary code imbedded in the aluminum of the disc. This means that ones and zeros are rapidly put through the processor which reads them as yes's and no's. YES, this is a sound at 44hz and therefore an E note, YES it starts abrubtly and fades slowly, etc. What's amazing here is that CDs sounded like shit until they changed the book-standard in the late 90s and also finally realized that you couldn't use the same mastering you used for a vinyl acetate.

But what's really amazing:
When a master tape goes to the record plant, a converted master is made by using a soft blank record and a cutting stylus. The master tape is played into this as a record-player-in-reverse and the cutting stylus cuts the groove*. When this acetate is accepted as good, it is used to make the mold for the press stampers. Vinyl pancakes are then pressed into records. When you take the album-on-vinyl record home, you reproduce it with your brand/shape of stylus. The walls of the groove merely vibrate a diamond but out comes this full frequency range recording. WTF?!

*Here's a good question. If a groove is .4 mm wide and the width of the playable section is 10cm, how many grooves are there on the record?

Corollary. Was Edison a freaking genius or what?



Post Edited (01-05-06 03:13)

>
>
> *Here's a good question. If a groove is .4 mm wide and the
> width of the playable section is 10cm, how many grooves are
> there on the record?
>


2?

2.5?


i talk about edison a lot: an ordinary man and a bit of a prick to employees and like his friend henry ford a bad duck hunter but excellent anti semite, he also combined tech know how with imaginative vision: after cleaning up the limitations of a lightbulb (as if that isn't enough on a headstone) he then sat back and SAW the electrical grid that will be needed for 20th C municipalities.

i dig Alex G Bell even more.

what will yr headstone say?



Post Edited (01-05-06 10:23)

edison did have his positive qualities but i tend to see him more as "a bit of a prick" who rode on a lot of shoulders to which he failed to give credit, took advantage of and/or tried to destroy, particularly his employees, who did most of the inventing, ie, tesla who invented ac current. edison didn't pay tesla the money owed for inventing ac and then edison tried to smear ac current reputation by shocking an elephant to death, supposedly demonstrating that ac was a public hasard.
victrolas are great.
i hear i-pods lack sound quality, though haven't tried one.

And a Tesla coil in your living room is a cool thing to have going, lightning bolts flaring away, when the pizza delivery guy shows up. Especially if you can be dressed in a wizard outfit when you answer the door.

Or how about Dr. Forrester from MST3K?

or Meg n' Jack a la "Coffee and Cigs"

Jeez, I was going to say that myself, but I mentioned the White Stripes enough in my previous posts

Come to think of it, records smell.
-I used to think that carefully using the discwasher heightened the anticipation. There's no cleaning a CD every use.
-CDs last until fingerprints/scratches create imperfections in the accuracy or until heat/sunlight/time oxidize the aluminum layer. Records decay with each use because a diamond is the hardest substance on earth and a sharpened one is "ripping" through soft plastic. Also, artifacts are introduced and welded into the groove.
-Your turntable stylus can not accurately reproduce what the cutting stylus because the cutting stylus at the record plant is triangular and very sharp when it cuts the groove. If you played your record with this stylus, you'd cut the groove smooth. So, you have a choice of a spherical or elliptical stylus to prevent this. A spherical is better at reproducing low end but bad with highs; an elliptical doesn't reproduce the bottom accurately.
-When a record press gets worn, they have to cut a new acetate. Therefore, no two pressings of a title are exactly alike. With some titles, an acetate was played for a few different record execs before approval. This meant a slightly worn one was used for the pressing.
-Conversely, a CD player never plays the information the same way twice anyway. It takes a sample and then interprets what it missed. The accuracy is based on the quality of the processor (some manufacturers only use factory seconds) and the amount of samples taken. Red Book standard for Compact Disc is 16-bits at 44.1 kHz. Some manufacturers tout 18 and 20 bit decks. This doesn't help you playback a 16-bit recording; it's a scam. A CD player interprets the sound differently each time, but, technically, a record peaks on the first play and then deteriorates.
- Turntable arms are generally s-shaped. This is an attempt for the stylus to be aligned the same at the run-in band as it is at the run-out. But it never quite works out. It's always a little skewed. This means, by the time you get to the final track, one side of the stylus (one channel) is slightly out of phase. Course, this (along with the magnetic cartridge and its multiple 'samples') are the reasons for the warmth, so hmmmm...