Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Love it or hate it, it just won't stop
Neal
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#31 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Neal »

I've got that FYC album I'll bring it up
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#32 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Cressy Snr »

Neal wrote:Bring some of them to owston Steve, a quick clean on Nicks RCM may do them some good
Yes that's a good idea. I'll sort a few out.

Just playing my Best of the Doobie Bros Vol 1 and was waiting for "Black Water" to go :

" MiSTHZiSTHZippi moon, won't you keep on shining on me" followed later in the song by:

"I'd like to hear STHZome funky DixTHZie land,
pretty mama come CHake me by the hand"

Well no it didn't but the damage could be faintly heard behind those sibilants.
However it's perfectly livable with compared to the horror it was. :lol: :lol:

Anyway, yesterday I forked out some money to our Ant and bought the rebuilt Lenco motor unit.
I reckon I'm back in the vinyl fold. My records haven't sounded this good for a very long time.
I'm pleased.
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#33 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by cressy »

It was all art of my evil master plan to get the black stuff spinning on Kelvin St again
Bwahahahaha......er.....
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#34 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Mike H »

:lol:
 
"No matter how fast light travels it finds that the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."
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#35 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Cressy Snr »

Been going through my vinyl steadily over the past few days, sorting the playable from the completely shagged.
four so far have to go, which is not bad considering. Mind you I have a fair few yet to go.

I've already mentioned the FYC and Terence Trent D'Arby. records.
They have now been joined by Randy Crawford "Windsong" her voice is well buggered up with buzz saw distortion caused by mistracking. I'm going to have to build up slowly to trying "Secret Combination" because I know what's coming and what the outcome will be" :lol:

Then there's Dire Straits, first album:
track 2, "Water of love"
FirSSTH there was a river, now thereTH a SSSSTHTone,
You know itSSSSSTH evil when you're living alone."
Plus of course the immortal "SSSSTHix blade knife" say no more :lol:

Level 42s last good record, of their pop period, "Running in the Family" is borderline, but the songs are so good I can't part with it and I suspect it's fuzz is more down to it being played to death in the 80s. Takes me back 8)
I might even search out a nice s/h copy of this.
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#36 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Cressy Snr »

Well I've gone and bought myself actual record; the first since 1992.
David Gilmour's "Rattle That Lock"
It's heavy, flat, noise free and sounds good.
Now some of you lot might think its a boring, self-indulgent piece of old fart garbage, but I love it.
Musically great, good production and quite a poignant record.

One bloody vinyl moment however on track 4 side 1, "A boat lies waiting". After a long piano intro, Gilmour's voice comes in and lo and behold we get that fucking damnable SSSTH sound on his very first word. :x :x :x
The rest of the album is fine.

There is a card in with the album where you can get a free download of a 320K mp3 version of the album.
I duly downloaded and extracted it and playing the same track, gives no such problem. However, the sibilant in question is very very pronounced and lances right out at the listener. If the mastering engineer cut that without a de-esser, then I cant think of a cartridge on earth that would track it. This is a pity and makes me wonder if these days there are enough good mastering engineers still around. Now somebody will come on and tell me that they have this album and their turntable arm and cart has no problems with it. :roll:

I'm taking tentative steps with the black stuff at the moment, and surface noise does not bother me at all, but it won't take many of these types of tracking incident to put me right off again. This is a shame, but unfortunately I'm so hyper-sensitive to tracking problems that I really do fear I will just give up again unless I can get perfect tracking of every record; no exceptions.
I need to get Greg's Mayware arm up and running and see how it goes from there. The Rega arm is still a throwback to flat earth extreme rigidity, closed loop philosophy and TBH the type of reproduction that comes from this approach does not seem to suit me. I find it difficult to relax when listening to records, with the Rega. Hopefully the Mayware will be what I'm hoping for. A Naim Aro sounded wonderful if my memory serves me rightly.
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#37 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Cressy Snr »

I'm also wondering whether these "SSSTH" incidents could be also down to poor overload margins on most common or garden phono stages.
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Greg
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#38 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Greg »

I don't have that album but generally have never had sibilance from a Dave Gilmour/ Pink Floyd album. By way of contrast, at the weekend I was demonstrating a pair of speakers to a potential buyer who later became the buyer. He is into 'Easy Listening' a bit like our Phil so I selected a streamed playlist suitable for him. On the Seekers 'Georgie Girl' there was some serious sibilance, so the original recording is probably at fault. I'm surprised with your love of older recordings that you have not suffered this on some streamed or file fed recordings.

When you get the Mayware done, lots of pics please :)
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#39 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Greg »

Cressy Snr wrote:I'm also wondering whether these "SSSTH" incidents could be also down to poor overload margins on most common or garden phono stages.
.............or a bit of fluff on the stylus?
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#40 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by simon »

I don't have it on vinyl either Steve but if you feel the need to try it on a different system just to rule out or in you're welcome to pop round.
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#41 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Cressy Snr »

Hi Greg,
It's not so much emphasised ess sounds that are my bugbear with vinyl. As long as it's a clean, quick sound, even if it's emphasised, it doesn't bother me in the slightest. This is why I can listen to remastered sixties pop music from CD or download, without problems.

I'll try to exlain it:
Let's say there is a close miked, centrally placed vocalist and it's a silly example but let's say he or she sang the word "saskatchewan" with a bit of gusto. On the consonant sound, instead of it staying in the centre with the rest of the voice, and coming over cleanly, we instead get two, quite distinct, out of phase "THHH" or "FFFF" sounds from the left and right speaker, so that the ess sound spreads out across the sound stage, smearing the vocal.

If it is particularly bad, the two out of phase distortion components can actually be louder than the ess sound in the middle.
This is quite clearly a distortion of the vertical component of the stereo signal. in my view there are three ways this can happen

1. the stylus is being forced upwards and bounces at high velocity on and off the surface of the vinyl and ends up doing a Woody Woodpecker impersonation, causing out of phase distortion at the extreme left and right of the image.

2. the stylus is tracking correctly, but the signal is so strong that the cartridge generators saturate, causing the same distortion component to appear.

3. the cartridge tracks properly, the generators don't saturate, but the input of the phono stage overloads.

Years and years ago I had an amp with a mono switch. Throwing that switch stopped the distortion dead without fail, every time, so I am betting that it is a vertical tracking problem, and the only thing I can think of is that I have been unfortunate over the years to have never been able to get that critical arm/cartridge match right. It only started happening when I started using medium mass ultra rigid arms with small fixed headshells.
Last edited by Cressy Snr on Tue Jun 28, 2016 7:54 pm, edited 7 times in total.
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#42 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Cressy Snr »

simon wrote:I don't have it on vinyl either Steve but if you feel the need to try it on a different system just to rule out or in you're welcome to pop round.
I might just do that Simon.
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#43 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by simon »

You're very welcome Steve
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#44 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Greg »

Very interesting observations, Steve. Something I personally have never witnessed. Maybe some time you could demonstrate it to me as I would be really interested to hear it. Not in Sheffield often. Maybe the next Owston?
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#45 Re: Help me with my return to the vinyl fold.

Post by Cressy Snr »

I'm beginning to wonder to be quite honest, whether it's something that affects me but not other people.
I heard it at Owston, when David was demonstrating the clearaudio turntable. It was quite clear to me during the spoken narrative on the Daft Punk track. Nobody else batted an eyelid. Our Ant is used to me complaining and as soon as I tried to point it out to him, he just didn't get it either.
It was also all over the Steve Hillage track on DTBs Techie as a constant FFF noise that pumped up and down behind the music, yet it was completely absent on Neal's turntable, playing the same track, through the same amplification.
I'm quite clearly hearing something otherwise I wouldn't have noticed it's absence on Neal's TT. Maybe it's part of the fabled vinyl warmth experience.
As I have said often, playing in mono eliminates it entirely. 78s on a mono radiogram don't do it either, neither do mono 45rpm singles, played in mono no matter how ropey they may be otherwise. It's purely a symptom of listening in stereo.
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