A new toy for Carverfest.....possibly two???

.....A speck of dust ends up sounding like a bomb going off in your listening room.

I've never heard an LP that was 100% "absolutely clean and free of debris."

I wasn't seriously proposing the unit, you'd think for the price they'd at LEAST throw in a circuit similar to the SAE 5000; I was implying that if it were me, i'd leave my vinyl alone rather than bake the grooves.

Enjoy!
Rich

The LT? I didn't think you were.

BTW, the flattener works quite well. I've seen and heard the results.

Damn Rich, I just read the link provided. Pretty cool stuff. I apologize for not reading the link before. I was at work and I didn't have time to read it.

I have had time tonight and this laser pickup really sounds like it could stomp any record stylus out there for fidelity [in theory], however it reads just a small sampling of the groove. Not knowing jack about the grooves of a record, I take it that the same information is at the top of the groove as well as at the bottom of the groove? Basically, look at the picture below and you will see that the point of the groove isn't touched by the laser at all and even though this player has five lasers, all but two are utilized for alignment so the two that actually read the groove at 10 microns below the shoulder. I guess it has to be, the same information being from the shoulder to the bottom of the groove, right?


Now, another thought of mine was that if you have one side of the groove worn more than the other from the needle being out of alignment [I forget the term...VTI maybe?] and you have a record that has been played many, many times riding one side of the groove more so than the other, wouldn't [In theory again] the indentation of wear ride up to where the laser reads the groove?

Does anybody know the kinks that they are still working out? Is it reliability or tracking?

From http://www.elpj.com/about/how.html .....
"Only the part of the beams that reach the groove are reflected to two PSD (Position Sensitive Detector) optical semiconductors. The part of the beams that fall on the land area of the record are deflected and not picked up by the PSD devices. The signals are sent to a microprocessor via analog to digital converters, then to servos to maintain the reader head position directly above the groove."

Unless I am reading this incorrectly, it is still going thru an A/D converter which kills the aspect of getting vinyl sound, you are just reading it from a vinyl source, correct?

It is my understanding that most of the beauty of analog is that is is not converted, compressed or altered in any way with the exception of the quality of the stylus and the TT . Am I incorrect?

___________________________________________________________________________________

Now, on another note....I tried to work it out to where the record flattener would be available for Carverfest not only this year and for future Carverfests and the current owners and I feel that it would be to difficult to break up the schedule/rotation for that unit. So, I am down to three options..

1. Buy the flattener myself.
2. Have several Carver members become co-owners of the flattener.
3. Screw you guys and and become part owner of their flattener, working with the schedule that's already established.

I am open to suggestions and co-owners of this unit. I personally need this unit because I have 300 or so albums that have been sitting in storage for twenty some-odd years. At the bottom of each vertically stored album, there is a slight curve, disrupting the playback of the outermost part of the album. I have also noticed that albums that have been stored in double LP sets are also warped slightly where the album was folded together. There is no way in hell I'm gonna buy each album over again [even if I could, some aren't even available anymore], so this flattener will be a reality for me...whatever route I choose to go.

...BTW, the flattener works quite well. I've seen and heard the results.

I have no doubt it works...i'd be afraid of de-stabilizing the vinyl and softening the high freq ridges in the groove. I'm more of a leave it alone type, the furthest i've gone in that direction was a vacuum platter.

Enjoy!
RIch

... it reads just a small sampling of the groove. Not knowing jack about the grooves of a record, I take it that the same information is at the top of the groove as well as at the bottom of the groove?

Back in the day, there were a couple of different stylus shapes that were intended to deal with groove wear, some of them shaped to have the contact point lower in the groove than typical and thereby avoiding the 'worn' walls of the groove from other styli. IME these typically 'found' more deeply embedded dirt, but yes, the walls of the groove are modulated the same along it's depth (to the extent that's possible)

...wouldn't [In theory again] the indentation of wear ride up to where the laser reads the groove?

Depends on the wear, but the laser is designed to track the walls well above the contact point of a stylus, and wear should move down the walls...it shouldn't be reading worn walls. No crosstalk either.

...Unless I am reading this incorrectly, it is still going thru an A/D converter which kills the aspect of getting vinyl sound, you are just reading it from a vinyl source, correct?

the section you quoted regards the tracking lasers (which control the positioning servos). The actual signal lasers (next paragraph) are modulated by the groove wall, reflected to photo-sensors and converted to electrical signal...all analog

Enjoy!
Rich

Of course Tom, you could take that money for a flattener and apply it to a top notch SACD/CD player and you'll wonder WTF all the fuss was about vinyl. Seriously.

Back in the day, there were a couple of different stylus shapes that were intended to deal with groove wear, some of them shaped to have the contact point lower in the groove than typical and thereby avoiding the 'worn' walls of the groove from other styli. IME these typically 'found' more deeply embedded dirt, but yes, the walls of the groove are modulated the same along it's depth (to the extent that's possible)

I touched on this briefly in another thread about turntables and player old vinyl. There were 3 basic stylus shapes back then: Conical, Elliptical and Multiradial.

The electrically heated cutting stylus that is/was commonly used had a triangular shape with extremely sharp vertical contact patch (it had to actually cut the laquer master after all) which created the original V groove shape that everyone knows. The problem with using the same shape to reproduce sound was that it would actually chew chunks out of a vinyl record while playing so they came up with the 3 different shapes that still exist today.

Conical, when viewed in cross section looked like a circle and its single radius meant that the contact points of the stylus were very small and smooth, typically .007" in radius (if memory serves me right, though here I am using it as a relative value).


(please excuse my crude drawings which are not to scale)

Elliptical styli and an oval shape when viewed in cross section, but also had a larger vertical contact patch and usually rode a bit lower in the groove. Cheaper ellipticals typically had a ratio of .007" X .004", the better ones going all the way down to .007" X .002". The sharper edge made it easier for an elliptical stylus to better follow the sharper curves of high frequency notes on a record.



Multiradial styli had a variety of shapes that most often ressembled a sideways diamond shape with rounded corners and a much longer vertical contact patch that rode even lower in the groove, theoretically making it possible to pick up portions of the groove that had not been damaged by conical or eliptical styli. The almost razor sharp vertical contact patch of the multiradial styli allowed much higher frequencies to be reproduced at times up to a maximun or 40khz which was used with discrete 4 channel recordings (the 2 rear channels using the bandwith from 20khz to 40 khz).



2 main vendors were responsible for the vast majority of multiradial styli back then: Audio Technica with its Shibata stylus (almost ressembling a severely flattened heart cross section) and Bang & Olufsen/Ortofon with their Quadraradial (hope I got the name right) stylus. A few other high end Japanese cartridge makes made their own variations of these designs (some actually bought their diamonds from Audio Technica). Most of the large American companies also made variations on these basic shapes including Shure, ADC, Empire and Stanton, but none of them enjoyed as much commercial success as the 2 major players.

The whole point behind my earlier recommendation for using a Shibata cartridge to play back older records is that IF they are properly cleaned, then dirt and gunk in the very bottom of the grooves isn't a problem and the sharp stylus will read from an undamaged portion of the groove, thus restoring the original sound of the vinyl record. Records wear at the contact point, so the longer the contact point, the less wear the record gets.

As far as that laser vinyl player mentionned earlier, wear would not be an issue nor would heat for that matter, so the record would not melt nor any damage whatsoever occur. A CD or DVD doesn't melt when it is played in a laser player, does it?

...As far as that laser vinyl player mentionned earlier, wear would not be an issue nor would heat for that matter, so the record would not melt nor any damage whatsoever occur. A CD or DVD doesn't melt when it is played in a laser player, does it?

I was talking about the record flattener possibly softening the upper freq detail by heating up the vinyl, not the laser player. Thanks for the styli info and drawings; great refresher

Enjoy!
Rich

...As far as that laser vinyl player mentionned earlier, wear would not be an issue nor would heat for that matter, so the record would not melt nor any damage whatsoever occur. A CD or DVD doesn't melt when it is played in a laser player, does it?

I was talking about the record flattener possibly softening the upper freq detail by heating up the vinyl, not the laser player. Thanks for the styli info and drawings; great refresher

Enjoy!
Rich

Good point actually, but if you refer to the drawings above you will notice that the stylus actually reads a portion of the groove very near the bottom of the V. The record flattener uses a much lower heat than is required to actually deform the grooves in addition to only being applied to the flat surface at the very top of the grooves. Ths flat surface is much greater than the surface the grooves have cut out, so unless you forget a record in there for weeks or months with the heat on, i seriously doubt that it would manage to deform the shape of the groves so deep as to affect playback in any way.

In the old days, we used to do something quite similar using 2 heavy plates of glass, a couple of bricks and shoving the whole thing into an oven at a few hundred degrees, much hotter than the record press and I never managed to deform a groove, but I did manage to un-warp a whole lot of vinyl disks enough to play. It won't do miracles with severly warped records or records that look like an old fashioned washing board, but will at least make most of them playable. The only warning I would have about the record press is that the records must be absolutely clean so the dirt in the bottom of the grooves doesn't bake in there permanently.

Kind of like using a jewellers hammer to nail small brads into a balsawood doll house while wearing magnifying glasses versus doing the same thing using a 2 pound sledghammer while using binoculars. Or using jewellers rouge to buff out small scratch on your car instead of using a belt sander with 20 grit sandpaper. The disk press seems more like jewellers rouge than a belt sander for its intended purpose.

Is the record press perfect? Probably not, but it is one of the most appropriate tools for the job. I have over 3,500 vinyl records here and I would definitely trust this device.

One last thought on the subject of using the record press. Over time the plasticizers used in the making of vinyl records can leach off the surface and evaporate making the surface a bit more brittle than it was when new, so the slight heating up in th record press would probably release some from below the surface at least partially restoring the qualities of fresh vinyl and improving on the sound. I may be wrong on this assumption, so if there are any chemists out there, please feel free to correct me.

Of course Tom, you could take that money for a flattener and apply it to a top notch SACD/CD player and you'll wonder WTF all the fuss was about vinyl. Seriously.

I know Jesse. You're killin' me though. I have an SACD player that just does not do the format justice and to find one that will.......just costs so damn much. "Someone's" Tri Vista is 8K right? OUCH!. That's between close to 1/2 and 1/3 of the $$$ of what I have blown to achieve the sound I have already.

I read and "heard" on the street that the Denon 2910 was "excellent" for SACD playback, and well....that's just not true. It's decent [at best] and the retail on that puppy was what 800 smackers?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when I hear [personally] a great SACD player, then I will entertain the thought of getting that player. Until then, words are meaningless to me when it comes to "recommendations" for a quality SACD player that does the format justice.

Besides, I'm liking the sound I am starting to achieve from the vinyl setup I have going right now, and the NG hasn't even hit yet. There's just something about vinyl I'm really diggin'. Plus, I can't get some of the LP's I have in any other format....except maybe You tube or some shit and you all know what my observations are about the "sound" of convenience.

Of course Tom, you could take that money for a flattener and apply it to a top notch SACD/CD player and you'll wonder WTF all the fuss was about vinyl. Seriously.

I know Jesse. You're killin' me though. I have an SACD player that just does not do the format justice and to find one that will.......just costs so damn much. "Someone's" Tri Vista is 8K right? OUCH!. That's between close to 1/2 and 1/3 of the $$$ of what I have blown to achieve the sound I have already.

I read and "heard" on the street that the Denon 2910 was "excellent" for SACD playback, and well....that's just not true. It's decent [at best] and the retail on that puppy was what 800 smackers?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when I hear [personally] a great SACD player, then I will entertain the thought of getting that player. Until then, words are meaningless to me when it comes to "recommendations" for a quality SACD player that does the format justice.

Besides, I'm liking the sound I am starting to achieve from the vinyl setup I have going right now, and the NG hasn't even hit yet. There's just something about vinyl I'm really diggin'. Plus, I can't get some of the LP's I have in any other format....except maybe You tube or some shit and you all know what my observations are about the "sound" of convenience.

The SACD debate looks alot like many others we've seen in the past, going the way of DCC, MiDi, Beta, and Vinyl. Like flat panel TV makers declining profits are crippling the R&D of the next format. Companies producing DVD-As, SACDs, and LPs are having to charge a premium for their product just to make it viable for audiophiles without ever getting it into the mainstream where all of the R&D dollars are. Lacking the R&D $$ there won't be another QUALITY format in the years to come, so we'll have to suffer through what the record companies shove down our throats...gawd, can you imagine nothing better than MP-3????

Tim de Paravincini(big deal tube guy) suggests that SACD has only 1/2 the resolution of a good LP....and that digital music, while still enjoyable needs to have 24bits at close to a 400K sampling rate to even be close to vinyl. Bill Shockley says that's not even enough, he thinks the avarage LP
has close to 17 gigs of data on it and a whole new format should be found when memory gets alot faster than it is now.

Doesn't matter to me though....I can't hear the difference anyway

ray

Just an FYI to all that are coming to Carverfest this year. This Nitty Gritty does a great, no GREAT job of cleaning LP's when used in conjunction with the "Shark" steam cleaner. The combo even makes a brand new, never been played album sound better. Those that attend will see what I mean.

The combo even makes a brand new, never been played album sound better. ........

This stuff is supposed to be great too.

http://www.gruvglide.com/index.html

Enjoy!
Rich

I'm open to new ideas and things, but I would be hesitant to add a solution/chemical to the substrate of an LP.

Do you have any experience with it yet? I'll ask around and see if other folks have as I haven't run across this yet.

The combo even makes a brand new, never been played album sound better. ........

This stuff is supposed to be great too.

http://www.gruvglide.com/index.html

Enjoy!
Rich

Rich, I'm wary of anything that leaves a residue on a vinyl LP because it usually attracts even more dust and grime and the stylus litterally grinds this into the grooves, permanently damaging them. A company called Last also sells a similar product and has since the 70s and it was also lambasted at the time for the same reason.

Cecil Watts, the undisputed expert on all matters vinyl is adamant about this. You should read the book he wrote on the subject back in the 60 that also covers how to properly clean records. I have a PDF copy handy for anyone who might want a copy. Good back to basics reading IMO.