3 ms·
If you listen carefully to a vinyl record playback you can hear, very faintly, the start of a track at little before it actually starts. A 'pre-echo' that start
by jonsen 17y ago
If you listen carefully to a vinyl record playback you can hear, very faintly, the start of a track at little before it actually starts. A 'pre-echo' that starts exactly one turn of the table before.
The master record is cut in a relatively soft material. Copper, I think. The force of cutting removes material from the groove but also compresses the remaining material somewhat. This distortion may spill over into the neighbor groove just cut one turn earlier. The neighbor groove is silent between tracks. So in this silence you may be able to hear a faint copy of the modulation one turn later. This ghost signal gets more volume the tighter you pack the groove spiral, which you may want to do tighter to obtain longer playing time.
- anigbrowl 17y agoInteresting! I wonder if this has been deliberately exploited by dance producers...at 45 rpm and a bpm of 135, this will yield a 3-beat delay which sits nicely with a 4-beat base rhythm. Dance music production techniques owe a lot to reggae and dub, and as record producers working with low-quality equipment in Jamaica found ways to creatively abuse their gear. For example, there's a trick whereby you can turn a regular mixing desk into a low or high pass resonant filter by feeding the same signal to two channels and inverting one (so they cancel out), and then EQing the other channel aggressively. So if you can't beat the 'echo' resulting from the manufacture, you might as well look for ways to incorporate it.