Just taken delivery of the latest Peter Gabriel vinyl reissues of his albums ‘So’, ‘Us’ and ‘Up’.
They are genuine things of beauty; I don’t pretend to know what a half-speed remaster on 180gram vinyl can truly offer. However it did get me thinking, if this level of sound quality can be achieved on vinyl, then is a great deal of the stuff we are spending our hard-earned on sub-standard? The albums were about the same price as any new vinyl release, but are very clearly superior in sound quality (at least on my system).
Surely every record we buy now should be at this level?
The vinyl quality – rip off?
Fewer songs on each side, spread out on wider grooves, will always sound better, like 12″ singles do. It would be nice if more albums were made this way, but obviously they use twice the amount of materials and other production costs, so is unlikely to become the default setting.
OMG I am so tiddly. Soz for the “is” instead of “are”.
‘Spread out on wider grooves’.
Afterword motto, strapline and T-shirt.
Moose would certainly Oder one. Where is Mossenthese days? Haven’t seen him around here for a while.
A CD would also sound excellent given the same amount of care in the remastering process. There, I’ve said it.
http://i917.photobucket.com/albums/ad15/camplimp/pearlclutching_zps9236f3dc.jpg
Glad they sound good. Picked up a mint copy of So a few years ago for a quarter (25 cents), sounds pretty fine, so doubt I will upgrade
Apparently the most you can cram onto a 33prm is 16-18 mins before the sound quality really starts to deteriorate. As MiniB says it’s down to cost – there’s probably sufficient demand for double vinyl audiophile pressings from someone like Peter Gabriel but I don’t think that can be the norm for most artists, plus a lot of music doesn’t really warrant audiophile attention to sound reproduction.
The factoid I didn’t know is that toward the centre of the vinyl you lose clarity and have a reduced frequency range – which is why a lot of records from the pre-CD era end with a slow tune or a less rocky number on each side.
Not only do the frequency and dynamic ranges reduce the closer you get to the middle, but distortion varies across the playing surface. The ideal is a parallel tracking arm, but they are a bugger to engineer.
The compromise is skewing the arm/cartridge geometry for minimum average distortion. The sweet-spots occur at 63 and 121mm from the centre of the spindle. For this reason, 12″ long arms have a slightly lower distortion than the standard 9″, the increased length makes it harder to control arm resonances.
….goes on like this for hours, until gagged by bored wife….
I know parallel trackers are fairly rare, but they shouldn’t be too hard to engineer. As far as I recall, the lathe which creates the initial master disc uses a parallel tracker, so why don’t more manufacturers make them? After all some pivoted arms are horrendously expensive, so it wouldn’t appear to be on the grounds of cost?
The cutting lathe uses a head on a worm gear, turning at a speed set by the cutting engineer, so it knows precisely how far across the lacquer it is at any point in time.
A parallel tracking arm doesn’t know how widely-spaced the grooves are, so the stylus has to literally drag the arm across. If the stylus is not seated perpendicular to the groove, massive tracking distortion will occur.
So the whole idea relies on a completely frictionless bearing. Some use compressed air blown through an array of tiny holes in a tube, others use maglev.
It’s much easier and cheaper to make a near-frictionless set of ball bearings.
How about a wireless cartridge (thus no drag from wires), able to rotate as necessary in the headshell (ball-joint would be best) to always be better aligned with the record groove as it plays. Alignment to the record’s groove via a double stylus, front one for sound reproduction and another just behind it for tracking correction?
I’ve booked you two on the next series of Dragon’s Den. You can present this frictionless record player or whatever it is you’re talking about, as long as you name it after the Afterword in some way.
There was, post-LaserDisc, pre-CD, a turntable developed in Japan with a parallel tracking arm and a laser beam instead of a stylus. It cost about £20k, which in mid-80’s was enough to buy London.
Production never got beyond serial number 0000001.
I remember that but I think it wasn`t very good, anyhow all the above comments have really confused me and I can`t seem to stop looking at the arm on my turntable to see if it is tracking correctly and if the counterbalanceweight or whatever it`s called hasn`t moved.
Music sounds good tho.
Oh and those Peter Gabriel LPs are great sounding platters.
Waddya mean I can’t plough in a straight line? I ploughed exactly where I meant to.
Back in the 70s Pye’s Golden Hour series was just that: 30 mins a side and usually 20 tracks at a budget price. I guess they figured the drop in fidelity was compensated by the cheap price.
Some of the TV advertised LP of the 70s from Ronco, K-Tel etc also offered long playing times with predictable loss of sound quality.
http://i.imgur.com/yEs4JJ9.jpg
See also A Wizard, A True Star & Initiation by Todd Rundgren, both of which are about an hour long, and the sound quality suffers accordingly.
Golden Hour of the Kinks was one of my favourite ever albums. I still feel pretty much everything you need to know about the Kinks is on there.
Like so many UK 60s bands, for me it was always the singles with the Kinks
Off the top of my head….
‘Well Respected Man,’ ‘Two Sisters,’ ‘Animal Farm,’ ‘Where Have All The Good Times Gone,’ ‘End of the Season,’ ‘House in the Country,’ ‘I Go To Sleep,’ ‘Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home,’ ‘Big Sky,’ ‘Picture Book.’
I’m very politely going ‘nah’ on this one.
‘So’ is one of my favourite albums; I have the remastered CD with extra bits n bobs, and of course a car boot vinly. I’ve not heard Us or Up yet.
Dylan desire very long as I recall and sounds dense.
Get Happy crammed onto 2 sides originally. The promo version was a double album which it was finally released as last year as well as the lovely MFSL pressing which I got EC to scribble on
That’s one that straight away sprang to my mind. 10 tracks a side, a bit over 47 minutes total.
With a disclaimer from producer Nick Lowe on the back of the sleeve:
“..we are proud that we can now reassure hi-fi enthusiasts and/or people who never bought a record made before 1967 that with the inclusion of this extra music they will find NO loss of sound quality due to “groove cramming” as the record nears the end of each face..”
Nick also wrote and sang a song called “All Men Are Liars”.