This is going to be a fairly easy article to write for me, as in all truth what I knew about Vinyl recordings up to today was very little. I have spent most of my youth and pocket money on records in artfully designed sleeves, but have not really thought much about how they work. With this I decided to go deeper to find out whatever might drive my curiosity today. Here are 9 things I did not know about vinyl. I am almost entirely sure there will be 9 more soon to come.
1. Why albums are called albums: The reason albums are called albums is because in the golden days of the 78 speed shellacs a record would only hold about 4 minutes of song per side. Any collection of tunes and particularly classical works would therefore have to be put on several separate records. As early as 1908 people could purchase a booklet of several disks with a song on either side that were bound together to present the entire musical work. When long playing vinyl records were introduced, a collection of pieces on a single record continued to be called an album and the term transitioned into cassettes, CD´s, and our current digital formats.
Most sources cite German record company Odeon's to be the first to sell an album. The Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky was recorded on 4 double-sided records sold in a specially designed package in 1909. However, Deutsche Gramophone had produced an album for its complete recording of the opera Carmen in the previous year.
2. The reason some albums are oddly numbered: I remember that on occasion I "borrowed" my brother´s prized possession of The Who´s "Quadrophenia", a rock opera on double LP. I played it so often that I had the next tune already in my head during the silence between turning disks over. When later getting that recording in digital format, I remembered the sequence differently. The reason was that on vinyl the first side of the first disk was labeled 1, the first side of the second disk 2, its reverse 3 and the reverse of the 1st disk finally was 4. When playing Quadrophenia, this had slipped my intention as I simply turned the records over as one might. What the record label had in mind when pressing the discs was something called "automatic sequencing". The reason it exists stems from the existence of automatic record changers. 4 minutes is a rather short time to keep a party going and therefore early record players were soon offered with the ability to change records automatically. For this to work, the records were stacked together, the changer would change from one disk to the other automatically and only once in the middle the user would flip the stack over to play the second half. Granted, record changers for 78 shellacs with only 4 minutes play per side were an item of great convenience. With the advent of the long play record with 22.5 minutes per side, changers are relatively rare and only select few records were produced in automatic sequence. To make things worse, different types of changers existed requiring different sequences depending on how they switched. Some radio stations didn't want to have change disks during play at all and employed two turn tables one for the even sides and the other for the odd sides and had special radio copies pressed that employed what is called "relay sequencing".
3. End-track Distortion: As a record turns at the beginning of the first song, the stylus or needle travels through the groove at a speed of around 0.5 m/s On the end of the last track close to the label, this speed drops to about half. Anyone who was an audiophile in the time of magnetic tape, knows that the faster a tape was spooled, the better the quality might be. With a record something similar happens, and towards the center all the musical information has to be encoded in the grove in half the physical space. This leads to something called end-track distortion. If your favorite song happens to be on the inside of a record, then this becomes a real problem. Don´t fall in love with "The long and Winding Road" on the Beatle´s "Blue" Album, as you may be chasing for the perfect stylus and cartridge quite a bit. But even after the most careful calibration you will still hear distortion. This is probably also the reason why important works were also available as singles to be played at 45 rotations per second not 33 1/3. At that speed distortion would not be a problem even on the inside of the song. To mask this problem, some record companies pressed their records with the first side playing form the outside in and the reverse side inside out. That way distortion would still be a problem, but a gradual one not one that would magically disappear when flipping the record to creep up again towards the end. On a side note, CD´s are read from the inside out and vary the rotational speed of the disk to keep the bits per second being read constant without varying the space between "bits".
4. Stereophonic sound, please explain? Back in the days I wondered how a single groove can encode left and right channels independently and someone told me that one channel is encoded in horizontal motion and the other in vertical motion. I accepted this as fact, but remember being surprised. How would the one channel that was acting in the direction of gravity sound remotely similar to the one acting vertical to it? As it turned out I was right to be suspicious: while vertical / horizontal separation was an initial form of stereo implementation by Bell Laboratories in the mid 1930s it was also one of the several attempts to encode stereo in records that eventually failed. Another implementation was that of Mr. Emory Cook in 1952 who devised a recording consisting of two grooves tracked by two tone arms. Two tone arms were running in parralel one starting in the middle of the record and the other on the outside. For the inner arm the before-mentioned inner grove distortion became rather audible due to the difference in distortion between right and left. Mr. Cook's rather questionable solution was to distort the other channel just as well if be by electronic means to make the fusion of both equally dismal.
The final contender to make the race for an industry standard in stereophonic reproduction was a 45 degree implementation of both channels in the same groove. This worked charmingly well and doesn't reduce the length a record can play by much. It does, however increase the thickness a little-bit and hence the amount of vinyl that was needed. Another challenge with this approach was getting good "channel separation," avoiding that one channel would hum along with the other and this attribute lead to the enthusiastic implementation of "ping / pong stereo" on audiophile recordings to demonstrate how vastly "separate" the channels were. Channel separation seems to have caused some sort of audiophile post traumatic stress disorder and I still get asked about that attribute on our MicroFidelity amplifiers. The answer is separation is about 112 dB or the difference between the sound of rustling leaves in one ear and the sound of military jet aircraft take-off from aircraft carrier with afterburner on the other. Live with it. Move on shall we?
5. Sibilance Distortion: In all honesty I heard these words for the first time, when a customer seemed joyfully happy that our SoundSommeliers line of loudspeakers didn't have any of that stuff. While I was glad that things worked out for him, it did leave me wondering what it might be and how we ended up avoiding it. It turns out that just like channel separation, Sibilance is an audiophile artifact that stems back from the times of vinyl; when tracking high frequencies in a groove, the stylus or needle might sometimes loose contact and skid across minor dips. This would create a dreaded hissing sound more audible on the inside tracks. It particularly lead to consonants to be slurred. Not entirely avoidable, one of the fun challenges of choosing cartridges, setting up tone arms and turn-tables is the elimination of sibilance. Good luck with that.
6. Loud, long or good. Choose two. My mildly audiophile father is the proud owner of the first commercial classical recording in digital format. Tchaikovsky´s 1812 by the Cincinnati Philharmonics under Eric Kunzel. The work was presumably chosen to demonstrate the technology of the incredible dynamic range of the composition. Pjotr Illich´s celebration of the Russian´s over Napoleon´s unruly winter invasion spans soft orchestral music with the explosions of cannons and oversized church bells. The unfortunate aspect of this outright visionary recording was that no digital playback devices were available anywhere. In result this impeccable digital work got pressed on vinyl nonetheless leaving what I remember to be a whopping 3 mm between the groves when the canons fire. The picture above shows such cannon fire at 12:32 into the overture. I also remember that after playing the disk and switching to something else, the volume on my father´s stereo was far louder than usual, much to my mother´s dismay. Having a turntable that tracks Telarc´s 1812 is a prized possession in the audiophile vinyl world, by the way. My dad´s did. When developing the LP or long play records, there was an immense trade off between loudness (dynamic range) and length. A silent record could, in theory, play more than twice as long as the usual 22.5 minutes per side, since the groove wouldn't need space to wiggle. Neighboring grooves could therefore be closer together enhancing playtime. While 50 minutes of silence is a prized good in today´s rapid world of noise, there would be hardly be a market for a disk that plays silence. Or would there? Experimental composer John Cage´s orchestral work of 4'33¨ of silence seems to suggest some hope for the 90 minute vinyl record. Nevertheless, the trade off has always been to squeeze as much music on a record and still have it sound reasonably good. Spoken word records have been released to be played at half the speed and suffer some rather severe inner groove distortion in consequence. Radio Shack holds the record to have produced a 45 minute record, but the sound is reported to have been dismal at best.
7. Vinyl has absolutely no bass and screeches like a circular saw: It is a not so well kept secret that vinyl record, by mechanical means alone, are outright terrible at recording bass notes. I estimate that Tchaikovsky's Telarc cannon groves would take up approximately 100 times the 3 mm I recall them to have if they were to rely on mechanics alone. This is about the distance from here to China, especially for those readers who are rather close to the Chines border. The other dirty secret is that any stylus screeches quite a bit more than we would like to think as it plows through the groove of a record. And by that I mean that the sound the stylus makes when cutting through a unmodulated (silent) groove would be loud as a circular saw cutting through metal at amplification levels that we find in normal listening environments. In order to make records work at all the Record Industry´s Association has standardized an equalization curve where Bass notes are recorded 20 dB less loud than they really are. This is done to save groove space and thus squeeze more music onto one record. At the same time high frequencies were recorded At the same time high frequencies are recorded 20 dB louder. This is done to separate the signal from the noise, the screeching from the music. Once these highly unrealistic movements are picked up by the cartridge, the signal is passed through a special phono pre-amplifier and the equalization curve is reversed This brings things back to something more or less "flat". If the digital world did anything similarly intrusive, this would be considered desperate and obscene by all the vinyl lovers out there. There is something charming about mechanical solutions that lets us get away with doing "whatever it takes" to get away with "whatever it is we want to do". One side effect of this massive amplification of the bass notes is the possibility of bass feedback or "rumble". This an effect in which the stylus is exited by the bass coming back from the speakers. This excitement in turn gets massively amplified again though the RIAA curve. Hence the audiophile vinyl community put´s so much emphasis on isolating their turntables acoustically and likes to make them rather heavy. Also heavy things are usually easier to sell at a higher price. (See potatoes)
8. Vinyl records get so hot through friction with the stylus that they actually melt. I did this away as an urban myth when I first read about it, but soon convinced myself otherwise. The stylus does get incredibly hot and records are made from a polyvinyl chloride/polyvinyl acetate copolymer at 90/10 mix roughly and it's melting point is between 110 and 120 degrees centigrade. now granted the hot stylus moves across any part of the record rather quickly but on a micro level, melting does occur leading to some gradual degradation of the record.
9. Vinyl does not sound better than digital. Period. But it is often more carefully recorded. I personally believe that good digital can sound like anything that those who understand good digital want it to sound like. That does include the endearing warm sound of vinyl. What I believe really get's people rightfully hooked on vinyl is how incredibly hard records are to record, cut, press and then reproduce. Every step is surrounded by trade-offs, is technically complicated and presents many limitations. The steps taken are beautifully intricate and have to be carefully executed by masters of the art. A vinyl recording is probably a much more intimate personal experience than anything digital. With that, I can see dealing with the dust, the wear the humongous bother. On my next trip home to Vienna, I might just retrieve my old record collection and invest in a decent turn table. Lot´s of our customers play their vinyl on our SoundSommeliers line of speaker and I think I might just end up joining the club.
Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes quarter wave loudspeaker and sound systems at a price any one can afford. In his free time he blogs about everything, sound, music and audio.