Some of My personal thoughts about LPs Records

This article is totally subjective and simply reflects a lot of my own thoughts.  It is not intended to be academically rigorous or even particularly scholarly.  If I make mistakes of fact then it is because I was mistaken.

  by Dominic Vautier

 

When I was a kid

 

LP records are made of vinyl plastic and consist of tiny v-shaped groves.  Early microgroove records required a much smaller stylus size than the 78 RPM records did, anywhere from 1.2 mil to .7 mil but it took awhile for the recording industry to develop a standard.  I remember the little flip stylus, a needle that could rotate 180 degrees and had the huge 3 mil sapphire needle on one side for standard groove 78 RPM records (that everybody had then), and a little tiny  sapphire microgroove needle on the other side for the new 45 RPM and 33 1/3 RPM records.

In the record player we first owned sound was produced by a ceramic cartridge.  I think the inherent trouble with those early ceramic units was that the needle was too stiff to follow the grooves so you couldn’t achieve any real high fidelity.  As I recall, in the late 50s they came out with magnetic pickups which were of less mass.  But the magnetic pickups were quite delicate and could get damaged easier than the older units.  The magnetic cartridges also required different electronics because the signal generated was quite weak--but they sounded much better.

 

At that time in the early 50s it was all 78 RPM records around town.  We called them records because there was nothing else but plain old clunky breakable shellac “records” that chipped and cracked and busted and looked really ugly anyway.  If you cracked one, you just took some scotch tape and taped it at the edge.  If it broke again then it got chucked.

We had this early model RCA in our living room and there was a pocket for new iron needles on the left side and one for old warn out iron needles on the right side.  You were supposed to play a record three times then change the needle, but we were always running out of needles; so we kept reusing them again and again.

My brother got three copies of Rock Around the Clock on 78 RPM because he knew that the records would be shot after 20 plays or so.  I still have two of the copies.  One is in good shape but the other is really bad.

Along came microgroove and my world rapidly began to change.  I loved any kind of music especially the new "hi-fi" material.  We called the new records 33s and 45s.  They were advertised as “unbreakable”, although you could still break them without too much trouble.  The 45s came first and I remember we tried to use our old record players on the new funny looking records with big holes in the middle.  The records lasted about five plays on a monster 3 mil iron needle with its gigantic stylus pressure.  We quickly learned that the new records needed different equipment to play so everybody started buying record players that could handle both the old and new type records.  It was a very fun, interesting and confusing period in our lives.

 

It seemed like a time of incredible change in my own life.  I remember there was only monophonic music.  I never knew the words mono or stereo or even knew what these things meant.  To me microgroove records worked the same way as the 78s did but simply sounded better.  The big 33s were overwhelming because they contained many songs, not just one.  What a deal!!

In 1960 I was first exposed to true stereophonic sound.  the new sound was astonishing.  Everybody was suddenly talking “stereo” and you had to make sure when you bought a record that it was labeled “stereo”.  Stereo records sold for more money.  The record shops kept different sections for the mono and stereo material. 

 

It seemed to me that stereophonic sound really revolutionized the recording industry because it presented a panorama of sound very much like our own two ears perceive sound—and it was a wonderful thing.  My understanding was the way the record companies achieved this was by imparting a different set of wiggles to the two sides of the v-shaped grove, each one at 45 degrees.  The stylus then would wiggle one way as it followed the left side of the grove and also wiggle another way as it followed the right side.  Inside the pickup were two magnetic coils that detected and isolated these wiggle vectors and transmitted the appropriate signals up to two separate channels.

So I suppose this could be considered "Edison's revenge".  The man fought tooth and claw over his hill-and-dale tracking (vertical) patents, whereas the Volta Group and subsequently the Victor Company were very successful using side to side stylus movement.  Stereo is in a sense a combination of these two ideas.  

 

Most pickups consisted of two parts, the stylus and the cartridge.  The cartridge contains magnetic coils that convert very slight movements of the stylus into magnetic impulses. The stylus usually is a box-shaped shell inside which there is a very delicate arm with a small .7 mil diamond needle attached to the end.  This arm is expected to move small distances at up to 22,000 Hz, which is really really fast when you think about it.

 

MATERIAL

Vinyl is pliable--kind of like rubber.  Every time a stylus passes through those intricate little groves it deforms them a bit.  But very soon, often within seconds, the groves go back to their original shape unless they are deformed too much.  That’s what happens when you play an LP record with your average garden-variety clunker $10 (gorilla) record player with a stylus pressure that weighs in at 15 or 20 grams or more.  Zounds Batman!!!  It’s like a miniature knife cutting down all those poor little wiggles.

 

When I buy a record at a local second-hand store or garage sale I can never really tell how well it plays because I can't see the gorilla footprints.  Never mind the finger prints, beer stains, lipstick, gum, and smudges, although that is often an indicator of overall record care.  A record may not even have a single scratch, which probably means that it’s a good record.  But it may have been played just once by one of those gorilla machines that permanently deform the little high frequency wiggles and the record has a lot of nasty high-end hiss--not good.

Smaller scratches can be removed after being digitized.  It just seems to me that small pops and snaps can be detected with the right algorithm and removed cleanly without destroying too much of the signal or headroom.  I consider headroom is that wonderful sound of air and depth between 8000 and 12,000 Hz that can give so much life to a recording.  Got to keep the headroom.

The “S” never lies  

I always look for the “s” sound because to me it often determines the condition a record is in and what kind of treatment it has been through.  The “s” never lies and is a pretty good indicator of quality.  It’s a sound component that goes way up above 10,000 Hz.   sometimes I also judge a cartridge by the way it plays the “s”.  If the cartridge is tracking too lightly it can rattle around and produce a “sssshhh” sound instead of a clear "s".  If the cartridge is tracking badly or too little on the outside groove (skating pressure) , I will sometimes detect get a sloppy “s” on the left channel. 

Lazy tone arm 

I think record player companies got lazy and installed the tone arm mount too close to the platter.  They may have done this because they wanted to keep the record machines smaller and reduce shipping costs and also have them conform to the size of other hi-fi components, like pre-amps, amps, tape decks, and receivers.  This caused problems because in order to track the groove properly the tone arm had to overhang the turntable center which created a force vector that tended to move the tone arm inward.  If the force vector overcame the weight force that kept the stylus properly tracking then you get “skating” where the entire tone arm decides to take a joy ride to the center of your LP.  Skating caused other problems too.  It forced the stylus to hug the inside of the groove and sometimes you got “chatter” on the left channel (outside groove).  Sometimes the left channel would sputter and click, all a result of bad contact with the groove wall.

Another thing about stylus tracking.  Study your cartridge and see how it tracks the record.  I have found that it is sometimes necessary to add small paper shims to the mount to get the stylus to track properly.  Over time and use the stylus could twist a bit or lose some of its shape.  The standard mount allows a good deal of cartridge rotation from side to side.  But if you want to make adjustments other ways you need shims.  Better to do this then to try to bend the stylus.

   

It seems to me that this whole problem of skating is not all that complicated.  A lot depends on the record itself so there is simply no hard and fast rule.  I have some records that just love to skate regardless of what I do (apparently the cutter did not cut enough).  If the record is well cut then it usually is good enough to hold the stylus with or without antiskating applied.  Sometimes a defect or scratch will throw the stylus out of the grove but it should bounce to the next groove.  If it skates, increase your stylus pressure slightly and increase the antiskating.  Usually the antiskating device corresponds to the stylus pressure (which does not make a lot of sense to me).  The theory is that more stylus pressure creates more inward force, and therefore you need more outward force or antiskating.  But increased stylus weight also will tend to keep the stylus in the grove.  Good records don’t need any antiskating if you track at one to three grams.  If you track at less than a gram, anything can happen.  The tone arm can take a joy ride at that tracking.      

Wiggle Room

Then another problem arose from tone arm overhang.  This was jamming where the round stylus could not follow both groove walls and it usually happened toward the end of the record where the wiggles have to be really really compressed.  Look at a record and you will notice it has about two and a half times the room on the outside than it has on the inside.  So they had to develop elliptical styluses to solve this problem.  These are not round cones but flattened cone shapes that can track those tricky little inside groves better.

Clean as a whistle

 Some people get way too preoccupied with cleaning records.  I noticed that a few fingerprints on a record really do not seem to matter much because the oil is on the top of the groove.  I'm not sure how reactive oil is with vinyl but it probably could get in the wiggles?  If you get really obsessed about cleaning, then use lots of cold water and mild hand soap.  Warm water may warp a record but it will return to its original shape once it cools off.  Water and soap do remove the fingerprints and just about anything else within reason but it can leave a residue.  I once got a record that had an iron left on it.  Not only was it badly warped. but the grooves were melted on part of the record.  I was able to save the inside half.

I did get some good feedback from Andy and he had some excellent suggestions on record cleaning.  In his short web page he says that the use of detergent is far better than just plain old hand soap.

There is a possibility that fingerprint oil can collect on your stylus and then you have to be real careful when cleaning a stylus.  I always dust off the record just before play while it is turning and before lowering my stylus.  I think that’s common practice anyway.  You don’t want to finish recording and find a bunch of dust collected on your stylus.