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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Dual groove records (and other vinyl tricks)
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 05-10-2014 09:53 PM
All but the hologram thing have all been done before. I once worked on an album and wanted to know if I could have all 6 songs all start in different lead-in grooves with each song playing as a single cut across the whole length of the record. You wouldn't know which song you would hit when you dropped the needle. The mastering engineer told me it would work in theory, but only a crazy person would do that. No argument there. In my defense, it was the time of psychadelia and it seemed quite appropriate to me.
There have been a number of experimental inner-to-outer groove pressings of audiophile "specialty" LPs over the years, the advantage being that for genres like symphonic music where the finale is almost always the loudest modulation, having that occur at the outer edge instead of the center reduces the dreaded inner groove distortion that builds toward the center, plus of course no matter the groove pitch, the speed is slower and distance/time is shorter at the center which negatively affects frequency response. Actually it would have been much better if the tradition had been that all LPs be pressed inner to outer.
Thing I don't understand is with all the wild things these guys were trying to do to make their record unique, why did they stick with black vinyl? They could have done transparant color vinyl or even do an imbedded picture -- those kinds of LPs, while they have been done before, are still REALLY impressive. I once saw a transparant, multi-color LP where the colors flowed into each other -- awesome to look at and look through! Sticking with black is just boring.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 05-11-2014 10:19 AM
I have a feeling that the inner groove distortion problem - with microgroove records at least - is essentially a function of how skillfully the lacquer is cut and how much running time you're trying to get on a side. I'm also wondering if, going back to the mid-30s and earlier, when the master was wax rather than nitrocellulose lacquer (i.e. softer), less control over varying the groove pitch was possible, making it an even bigger problem.
The worst records in my collection for inner groove distortion are classical ones from the very end of the LP era (mid to late '80s) when the same title was being published on LP and CD, and to save the production costs of a double album they tried to cram sometimes up to 40 minutes onto a side. The all time record (excuse the pun!) I have is in a box set of Elgar I bought at Amoeba Records in Hollywood last year. It was originally published in 1988 as a budget-price repackaging of EMI's recordings from the '60s and '70s on three LPs or CDs. I'm guessing that they sold very few of the LP version, because the one I got was new, old stock, still in its shrink wrap.
Some overture (can't remember which), plus the first three movements of the violin concerto are all on one side - 42 minutes in total! The fact that it's a DMM pressing helps things a little bit (I'm not sure it would physically have been possible to gut a groove pitch that tiny on a conventional lacquer), but the fact that the slow (quiet) movement of the concerto is at the end of the side means that even with the amp cranked up to about three o'clock, you're basically hearing a noise to signal ratio.
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