9 More Things I didn't Know about Vinyl..

Thursday´s article on "9 things I didn't know about vinyl" clearly struck a cord. Several thousand people read and are still reading the article and shared it with their friends. With that the verdict is out and vinyl is clearly not dead. And while many of the technical details of bringing a record to life might have been common knowledge in audiophile days past, there is clearly a new generation of vinyl lovers growing who are looking at this like me, with the marveling eyes of a child. The topic really didn't loose it's grip on me and I found more curious and interesting things about vinyl that I put together for today.

1. Random fact: If a record grove were the size of the Grand Canyon.

If a record grove were indeed the size of the Grand Cañon, the stylus tip would be 6 km across or about the size of Mars' smaller moon Deimos. It would also be nearly as large as the asteroid accused of ridding the world of dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. Our stylus, would, however, travel around 10 times faster than that doomsday rock. Now even at the modest speed of 25km/s this meteorite formed the formidable Chicxulub crater at the tip of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. It would be likely that something this size tracking the Grand Cañon would hitting an imaginary scaled up piece of dust at 340km/s, the earth´s rotation would invariably change forever, all life would be extinct immediately and there would be a good possibility for the creation of a second moon. This sounds like a great reason to keep your records clean, if you ever needed one.... The noise this thing would make would certainly be louder than those 302 dB the relatively small meteorite that exploded over Tungusta, Siberia in 1908 made. The sound of this meteorite blew windows out at 600 miles away. I would not worry about an amp right now.

2. Wikipedia is wrong. Wikipedia writes that the average length of a record grove is 460 m and this has become a fact etched in stone among record lovers. Now if we multiply the average tangential speed of a grove moving underneath a stylus of 0.4 m/s with a typical play length of 22.5 min we already get to 540 m Now this is still a gross underestimation: In sticking with the Grand Canyon analogy above, it would be like saying that the length of the Colorado River is 1200 km or shortest distance between Denver and Mexicali. The actual Colorado River is windy of course adding to its length. In reality it is at 2330 km nearly two times longer than the distance between its spring and its regrettable demise at the Morelos Dam. Now calculating the distance a stylus really travels is a rather complex task as it depends on both the music it is tracking and the RIIA equalization curve. This might be a task for more sophisticated signal analysis, but by visual estimation looking at the microscopic image above I would think that the length of the groove is about 25% longer than the distance between the endpoints. This takes into account that the stereo grove takes on a three dimensional shape note visible in the image. So with that, I declare the length of a record grove to be around 675 m. Unless someone is in disagreement about this in the comment section, I will edit Wikipedia to set things straight.

3. Pre- and post echo. LP records present a tremendous trade-off between length of play, dynamic range (loudness), and size. Record companies have arguably gone a bit too far to squeeze more music onto the medium than the medium can hold in good faith. This manifests itself in several limitations like end groove distortion or the need for drastic equalization by attenuating bass notes through the RIAA curve. All this was mentioned in my previous post in case you missed it and want to catch up. Now meet the next symptom of this battle of quality vs. real estate: Post- and pre echo: exactly 1.8 second before a song starts, a faint pre-echo of good things to come can sometimes be heard. Later again the grand finale of a tun reverberates with the same delay into the silence following the end of a track. This comes from the fact that records are produced by cutting groves into master discs using sophisticated and very powerful cutting lathes. These masters are then transferred several times and lastly mass produced by pressing them into vinyl. With real estate being so scarce the wall thickness between the grooves is slightly less than one might hope for the sake of audio purity. The cutting stylus plows into the neighboring grove and pushes material outward invading the grove to come. This let´s the record see the future and hold on to the past by exactly the amount needed for one full turn.

4. The most expensive record ever sold: Mark Chapman murdered John Lennon in 1980. Not nice. 5 hours before that John Lennon signed a copy of his and Yoko Ono´s Double Fantasy Album for his future murderer. Nice. Chapman, initially a great fan of the Beatles, was apparently increasingly angered by the fact that Lennon on one hand "imagined no possessions", while on the other hand was himself hoarding lots of stuff. He also considered some of his works "communist" which seems incongruent in light of his first grievance with property. Undisturbed by the fact that he might be disturbed, Chapman went on to kill Lennon. He had long schemed to murder the Beatle and after months of deliberation decided to shoot him in front of his Dakota apartment. He then surrendered to the police only after throwing the hand signed album into some bush at the crime scene. From there it was retrieved by a man who remains unknown to date who was himself a great fan of the Beatles.

This man became aware about the worth of his possession when photographs of the album signing were released. He surrendered the album to the district attorney for forensic testing in the case against Chapman. The album was later returned to the lucky finder with a note of gratitude from the district attorney. After 19 years and presumably in a financial tiff, the finder decided to sell the album and it was sold in 1999 for $150´000 US making it the most expensive album ever. Adding to the price, was the DA´s letter, the Lennon's signature being the last he ever executed and forensically enhanced fingerprints of Lennon but interestingly not of Chapman. It has apparently been offered up for sale again recently, this time for $US 600´000 but I could not find hard evidence on this note.

5. Save the world climate? Buy more records. Vinyl is a synthetic substance which is made from ethylene and chlorine. When processed, both the substances are combined to form Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) resin, or as is commonly referred to - Vinyl. Chlorine is readily available as it forms an easily separable half of regular table salt. Ethylene can be extracted from crude oil. There are many great things about vinyl amongst them that it is resistant to moisture and humidity Vinyl is also very strong and durable can be manufactured in a variety of colors even transparent. And last not least, vinyl is a very low cost material to produce. At least it was until in 1973 some Arab oil exporting countries declared an embargo on oil exports raising the price per barrel from $3 to $12. As hard as it may seem today, the entire free world was in mayhem over paying what amounts to 0.38 cents per gallon for oil. Record companies were in a serious crunch to get their hands on good vinyl and took all sorts of short cuts that affected sound quality. On one hand producers started to recycle old records by melting them down causing all sorts of impurities and quality problems. On the other hand they cut down on the amount of vinyl used per record making them thinner. The standard at the time was to use 130 g of vinyl per record and that what reduced to 90 g leading to warpage and other such problems. Today high fidelity producers happily offer between 160 g and 200 g for high quality recordings and use only virgin vinyl. Crisis averted and as long as we don´t start burning old records to heat our homes. Vinyl records are therefore a great way to store our oil without affecting the atmosphere. So if you want to save the planet, then buying more records might be the right thing to do.

6. Records cutting lathes are miracles of technology that no one is making anymore. The first step or producing a record consists of somehow converting music into vibrations that are transferred to a cutting stylus that spirals inwards cutting a grove in a disk or "master" as it was called. Those masters were initially made of soft wax and later of harder resins. The machine that does this is called a record cutting lathe. Early such lathes relied entirely on acoustic alone with the musicians singing or playing their instruments into narrow funnels that ended in a membrane that in turn was attached to a mechanism that moved the cutting stylus. This of course was a black art and sounded outright terrible compared to today´s standards. It particularly worked poorly for some larger string instruments and in many early recordings these were transcribed to be played by wind instruments instead. Later lathes used signals from electronic microphones recorded on magnetic tape. By then these machines incorporated rather powerful amplifiers that used up to 5000 W of power allowing for harder resins and higher frequencies. They also had liquid hydrogen cooling to prevent the master material from melting. All cutting lathes ever made were made before 1990. The dominating company making them was Neumann GmbH of Germany now part of Sennheiser. The company now focuses on building rather exceptional Microphones. With the demise of vinyl in the mid 80es early nineties many cutting lathes were turned into scrap metal. The ones still operating are producing good revenue for their owners and after a total collapse of an entire industry, mastering and pressing discs is now again a viable business.

7. Vinyl Sales are not recovering to any degree compared to the golden years. I have somewhere heard that Vinyl Sales are on the rebound and are approaching past numbers. While it is outright wonderful that many people are maintaining such a miraculous technology alive, the numbers are a mear fraction, of what was being sold in glory days past. The interesting revelation from the graph to the right is that the recovery is almost entirely due to Long Play and Extended Play recordings which are audibly inferior to Singles played at higher speeds. It strikes me odd that there is such a loyal crowd of people who are investing unbelievable amounts of money in turntables, cartridges, tone arms phono pre-amplifiers, isolation stands etc. are not demanding the return of the one vinyl format that was actually optimized for sound quality not playing time. Please leave any clues in the comment section as I am delightfully clueless.

8. The alledgedly most expensive turn-table on the planet is sold out. While I make my living selling great sounding speakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford, I figured google will handsome rewards in the form of search traffic if we add the term "audio pornography" somewhere in this blog. And what is more acoustically pornographic than a turntable for $US 300´000. Meet the Goldmund Reference II. I would provide a link to the site, but unfortunately this miracle of Swiss engineering sold out almost immediately and at a limited edition of 25 units can no longer be purchased. The first good thing about it is that is rather heavy and will therefore be more difficult to steal. The tone arm alone weighs 7kg the platter 20kg and to avoid unwanted vibration includes 15kg brass. At this morning's London spot market prices, the brass alone justifies 0.006% of the purchase price. Other price drivers include a nitrogen rectified belt. Here I would love a comment from someone who might know how one might use an inert gas to rectify a belt and why that might be desirable and / or expensive. Google left me standing with the answer for the first time in my life as a blogger. The Goldmund also has a cog free motor which is far superior to alternatives such as a diesel engine perhaps or jet propulsion. The turn table is machined to 1/100th of a millimeter. Our speaker bezels are a press fit and are turned down to 5 microns and our SoundSommeliers line of speakers only cost 0.1% of a Goldmund Reference II, we are clearly doing something wrong. Lastly adding to the price is teflon insulation which allows care free operations in temperatures between -260 Degrees centigrade while the music will continue to play cheerfully even with the house on fire. Oh and yes it has buttons that are integrated into the table compared to say being duck taped to the rotating platter. No wonder they sold out quickly.

9. Laser Turntables exist. Some people were very much concerned about record wear and as I learned in Thursday´s post, vinyl actually heats up enough during normal play that it microscopically melts. To fix this some people as early as 1977 went to the extreme to devise a laser turntable that optically tracks the groove completely touch free. The first working model, the Finial LT-1 (Laser Turntable-1), was completed in time for the 1986 CES and proved to have the interesting flaw of being too precise. While mechanically tracking turntables push away some specs of dust, the LT-1, read every impurity as a signal. This makes the popping and hissing almost unbearable even for the least audiophile ear. The library of congress actually is particularly concerned about record wear and has installed a device with the endearing name of IRENE. This device is also touch free but relies on rotating cameras and software to capture images of the groove. Software then converts these images back to music. IRENE is said to hiss a lot but is very tolerant to dust and specs through optical recognition and removal. I am beginning to think that the Goldmund Reference II might now have been the most expensive turn table at all.

Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price any one can afford. In his free time he blogs about everything, sound, music and audio.

#RemarkableVinyl #HIFIHistory