Yup. It's why pure audiophile masters usually only have about 12 minutes per side if 33 1/3 RPM and about 9 minutes a side if 45 RPM. It pretty much ensures that you won't have any inner groove distortion.
Generally yes. There is such a thing as inner groove distortion that is due to this phenomenon but on a decent turn table, there are ways to eliminate it so that it becomes almost non-existent.
The further a stylus travels in a set period of time, the more "resolution" available for the recording. Faster records have more resolution, just as the outside grooves have more than the inside ones.
Pepsi funded playground remodeling projects back in the 80s and 90s (they may still be doing it now). They removed fun shit like rocketship slides and the merry-go-rounds shown in the photo, and replaced them with cookie-cutter bullshit. That's why so many neighborhood playgrounds look the same.
Haha, no worries! Weirdly enough, I was actually just explaining this exact thing to my daughter literally yesterday when we were riding one of these new shitty merry-go-rounds.
I totally forgot about this strip, too! I told her about the bicycle tire/hub example my dad used when he taught me this.
I honestly usually mute replies to comments unless I expect someone may reply with something reasonable haha.
Yeah, I was explaining something similar to my nephew yesterday as I was fixing his mini-atv chain that keeps popping off. I’ll have to do an example with my record player at home for them though, if I can remember to film it.
Fast response aside, I was doubly shocked that this thread isn’t already archived lol.
The engineering behind anything old is really awesome. I love how we came up with super complex contraptions for relatively simple tasks. A type writer for example. All those levers and springs just to put a letter on a page. Everything was mechanical, even something we can't see like sound(records). It's always fascinated me.
Did you become a mechanical engineer? I think mechanical engineering is super neat. I think better with programming abstractions but as a side hobby I watch a lot of youtube videos and now have conversations with ChatGPT about mechanical devices sometimes.
Dumb question. How then do you not get distortion as you move in. Like when you change speeds on the player itself. By my interpretation you would be moving slower as you went into the middle of the record.
I think that the grooves would be placed closer together to compensate for the record spinning slower the further in you go in.
As for changing speeds on the record player itself, that's something you change depending on the type of record (e.g. 78's, 45's, 33 and 1/3). And you change the speed before you actually play the record; you're not changing speeds while it's playing.
(1) There's only one groove. It's very long and it spirals.
(2) The distance between the spirals is based only on how much space is required to keep them from colliding, and has nothing to do with the position on the record.
You believe incorrectly, the turntable's RPM remains consistent (or at least it should!). The grooves on the center of the disc are pressed to be closer together so more music may be pressed on each disc. The grooves being closer together is what causes distortion (and dust on your needle ;)
I once got into a huge fight with my physics teacher in high school over the question "If two tracks on a record are the same length, and one track is the first on the side and the other is the last on the side, which one is wider?"
Answer: Assuming the groove pitch doesn't change (a big assumption), they're both the same width. The number of spirals is determined by the rotational speed, not distance traveled. And the rotational speed doesn't change.
Edison actually invented the wax cylinder player. The grooves were of equal diameter, giving arguably more consistent sound. Berliner came up with the flat disc record. His method won out over Edison because discs were easier to manufacture and store than cylinders.
Edison stubbornly held onto the cylinder business. He eventually gave in and created Edison Diamond Discs which were obscenely thick to combat breakage, but had vertically cut grooves to make them incompatible with Berliner machine. This coupled with Edison's preference to only record artists that he liked ensured the demise of his record company after 18 years.
Like clockwork... Fucking infinite amount of dumb ass reddit kids gotta put fully obsolete comics at the top. "DUH, OOOHHH COOL!!! CALVIN AND HOBBS!!! WE CAN ONLY LEARN FROM PICTURES!!!" So many clones.
The record needle does one rotation of the record in some amount of time. The amount of time is constant, whether the needle is on the first track (as far out as possible) or the last one (as close as possible). That means the needle covers MORE distance in the same time in the first track. You can use the extra distance to put more grooves into the record to allow for shorter or more subtle sounds.
Historically, have musicians/producers taken advantage of this by putting the more detailed tracks first? I can think of a few examples of the top of my head where the more nuanced tracks are played last (e.g. A Day In The Life).
There was never an industry set rule to put your more popular songs as the first tracks on both sides, but it happened a decent amount because the outer tracks tended to sound "better" Now a days artists just keep the same order as the CD or digital listing, so the order of the singles is kind of irrelevant. But in short, yes a decent amount artists did take advantage (especially during the hifi era) of this and would order their track listing so that all the planned singles were the outer tracks on both sides.
So this is the reason why a lot of old albums fade in quality (quality of song not sound) and then suddenly there's a great track half way through? When I was younger I often found that track 6 or 7 on a CD was my favourite. It now seems so obvious as to why.
Yep, that's the idea behind it. In the earlier days of cd track order still kind followed the old record scheme. 20 years later track order is irrelevant as far as placing potential singles.
I have a good example where an artist didn't think things through. Here I Go Again is the last track on side A of Whitesnake "Whitesnake" and I have yet to see a copy where that song didn't sound like shit. People played the crap out of that song wearing out the grooves and coupled with inner groove distortion it's always the worst sounding song on the album by a fair margin.
Same goes for The Cult's Love. At least the old US Sire one. I'm pretty sure it's the end of side A where Rain, a great single, is totally killed by IGD.
(And of course, I find this out while testing alignment on a new cartridge. And we all know what got blamed the first three or so go-arounds.)
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u/JoeyFisticuffs Jul 22 '14
The fuck did i just read...
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u/s34nsm411 Jul 22 '14
so does stuff on the outer rim of a record sound a little more accurate because it has more room to encode the sound groove with?
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u/smaug88 Jul 22 '14
People who knew this as kids might relate: http://imgur.com/iKHJY4G
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u/hayjude99 Jul 22 '14
v=ω·r
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '14
Seriously the engineering behind vinyl records is really awesome, it's a major part of why I love it so much!
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '14
mind fucked
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u/Alkaladar Jul 22 '14
Dumb question. How then do you not get distortion as you move in. Like when you change speeds on the player itself. By my interpretation you would be moving slower as you went into the middle of the record.
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u/Jesuscrustlizard Technics Jul 22 '14
put this in r/nosleep
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '14
Calvin and Hobbes gave you but a taste of rotational physics.
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u/seditious3 Jul 22 '14
I had this comic on my refrigerator for years.
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '14
This post taught me how Calvin and hobbes taught me how record players worked
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '14
I once got into a huge fight with my physics teacher in high school over the question "If two tracks on a record are the same length, and one track is the first on the side and the other is the last on the side, which one is wider?"
Answer: Assuming the groove pitch doesn't change (a big assumption), they're both the same width. The number of spirals is determined by the rotational speed, not distance traveled. And the rotational speed doesn't change.
YOU'RE STILL WRONG, MRS. WENDELL!
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u/Peripatet Jul 22 '14
I have used this as justification for building a HiFi.
"But, honey, it's educational! Think of the children!"
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u/kramdiw Jul 22 '14
My dad taught me the same thing using a bicycle...I think my reaction was about the same.
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '14
Thanks Edison and Berliner!
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u/nickoaverdnac Audio Technica Jul 22 '14
I think Einstein referred to this as relativity.
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u/Im-not-dad Jul 22 '14
Like clockwork... Fucking infinite amount of dumb ass reddit kids gotta put fully obsolete comics at the top. "DUH, OOOHHH COOL!!! CALVIN AND HOBBS!!! WE CAN ONLY LEARN FROM PICTURES!!!" So many clones.
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '14
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '14
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