12" 45 RPM records: What's the story?
The main advantage is better signal to noise ratio and secondarily, better frequency response (because the groove wiggles are stretched over a longer length of groove.) I'll also add "better dynamic range"...those 12" 45 RPM records were simply awesome compared to regular LP sound. I used to buy tons of them (about half my old collection). The most noticeable improvement was in the bass. Less feedback issues especially at higher SPL levels. I am not sure if many night clubs still use them today, but these used to be the pro's choice to blast out quality hits over high end club systems and draw crowds. (A quality of sound production that few could match at home) |
Pre-echo is a well known fault of LPs, and, to the best of my knowledge, comes about when the master is cut, not when copies are pressed. Eldartford, Do you mean it is only at the beginning....or throughout the whole LP?? If you have echo going on throughout the LP (coming from the master or otherwise), I can't imagine how badly that would affect the noise foor (if it happens throughout). imean sometimes it was plainly audible even at low volume levels. What an awful thought... could this be why I preferred the 45's so much and found they had more clarity? (the 45's were insanely expensive compared to buying LP's with 8 or 9 tracks....often the 45 B side was garbage) |
the 'dance club' 45's are all over the board in quality.....mostly bad. I would agree that they are all over the board (so true of all recorded music whatever the media but especially pop....a real mixed bag). However, I would point out that in comparison to the LP's produced at or around the same time, I often found the 45's sounded better than their LP counterpart... Are dance club goers sensitivities less discerning of high quality sound reproduction than audiophiles? I have to think about that one. Admittedly, I have not been to a club recently, but in younger days, when my hearing was at its very best, the top high end club systems in the big city (where you had to line up for hours as well as pay to get in)....well....their sound systems sure impressed me! In fact this alone probably started me on the quest for a better home sound system as NONE of the big city audiophile stores came close in terms of exhilarating accuracy at high SPL's....I recall Blue Monday (New Order), Two Tribes (Frankie) and many other tracks that just blew me away....especially the accuracy in the hard to produce bass frequencies. ...and I don't mean boominess as top end clubs really had great gear...plus they had the advantage of packed crowds to absorb the longer reverberations. As Sabine put it...one person is roughly acoustically equivalent to 8 cushions in a lecture hall ;-) |
Some (45's) are better; most are not....my entire collection of 5000+ is comprised of original pressings spanning 1957-present Well that doesn't match my experience but I never got close to 5000 LP's I also used to buy import Japanese pressings of good LP's that I liked...expensive to own the same LP twice but I honestly felt there was an improvement in the better pressing quality. I must admit that this is a long time ago and I can't be absolutely sure if my findings were not related to wear and tear on the originals too as I never compared brand new with brand new...although some North American pressings were obviously bad (light weight and they had warps in them) ...my TT rig was like $300 dollars (as a student)....nothing like the beauties most of you Analog guys own on these forums... that might be a factor too...just my two cents |
to minimize pre-echo Eldartford, I always wondered about that....I used to think it was the fault of the master tapes and how the magnetic field transfered slightly to the adjacent tape above and below, as stored on the reel... But your descripton of vinyl pre-echo makes a lot of sense too, after all, stamping a relatively elastic piece of plastic with squiggles is sure to leave stress patterns everywhere and some leakage of squiggles between adjacent grooves once the stamp is removed...furthermore, other effects, like plastic expansion/contraction/curing may play a role as the ridges between the grooves will all be of differing thickness and therefore behave differently under stress from thermal effects. interesting... |
Can you cite a CD with pre-echo so that I (we) can check this out? I second Eldartford's question. Can anyone name a single CD with a pre-echo? I own a large number of CD's and haven't come across one with a pre-echo...yet. My experience tends to support Eldartford's statement that it is a problem in the "vinyl production process". Well over half my CD's are from analog master tapes....so the mag tape print through explanation seems to be on thin ice. |
Nsgarch, First of all, if there was any print through between bands on the master tape, that's easily eliminated when transferring the album to CD, just insert new silences between bands. Good point I hadn't thought of that...but hang on...if they could do that for a CD then couldn't they do something similar on Vinyl? Eldartford, I am with you. Do you need VC capital? How much money do you think there might be in a box between TT and amplifier. A pre-echo could certainly be detected by a simple cross correlation technique. To do this at reasonable cost, all you would need to do is digitize the signal. Then an adaptive filter could be designed to eliminate it. This is done all the time in countless other engineering domains where correlated noise (ghosts, multiples and echos) are removed using adaptive filtering. (Technically this is called a "convolution" filter...and knowing that the echo is 1.8 seconds ahead and behind the main signal would make it fairly easy to detect versus other time correlated information such as a repetitive drum beat...you would simply use a 1.8 second window to cross correlate) |
This thread just shows how interesting Audiogon can be. We went from 45 RPM to pre-echo somehow...but it meant that I learnt something new. Thx everyone. Most of you may not be aware of this; recording engineers will often make a dub of their finished mix or of the vocal tracks on the finished mix. This dub is then given a heavy dose of reverb and remixed in with the final mix at a much lower volume level (20 db down). This creates ambience in the music and very often improves the sound, as judged by listeners, Grammy awards etc. I am not talking any old sound engineers here....but the high $$$ pros in the top studios that use these tricks....people like Chuck Ainlay and the guy who perhaps jump started all the modern studio "enegineered" sound; George Martin with Sgt Pepper. Basically these tricks are just another form of Vinyl "pre-echo" if you think about it carefully. Could "pre-echo" be one of the reasons that some people consistently prefer the sound of vinyl over CD...more ambience, warmth, less fatiguing or clinical sound?? Acoustic studies suggest that this might make sense too...as the hearing can be very sensitive to difference tones and obviously the more background ambience in music the more chance that difference tones allow one to sense more detail or nuances in the music... Sabine studied this stuff and it is now well accepted that a completely "dead" room is just as awful sounding as a overly "live" room. Today architects use RT60 rules to design lecture halls all over the world. Just a thought...that I wanted to share..certainly for me this offers an excellent explanation why Vinyl might be preferred over CD. For you Vinyl enthusiasts, please respect that I understand where you are coming from in your love of Vinyl sound...I have a great respect for Vinyl and fully admit that on an individual recording Vinyl can sound much better than a CD (and vice versa btw). However, I don't accept many of the explanations of why Vinyl sounds better (such as the "digital has gaps" argument). Pre-echo seems like a plausable explanation for Vinyl sounding better than CD. At least Vinyl pre-echo can be measured and it is certainly audible. (whereas science, measurements and listening tests can easily show that "CD digital gaps" are inaudible when played back through a good quality DAC) Anyone disagree? |
Sorry Eldartford but if we want to form a company then we should have thought of this more than ten years ago and filed a patent. A cursory investigation indicates we might have to negotiate a patent license or find a workaround.... French Telecom Patent on Pre-Echo Somebody already thought of it.....I knew it was too obvious! Of course, if we just made the science up and sold a brightly colored interconnect exactly 1.8 meters long (get it - the perfect length to cancel the pre-echo); we wouldn't have to worry about a patent license...just rely on testimonials! |
Onhwy61, Thanks that was interesting. I assume the vinyl details are accurate, although the bit about CD or DVD compared to analog was completely incorrect. (The author is comparing raw analog signals and the raw analog output of CD or DVD very precisely resembles the original analog signal not a staircase. Comparing Digital information directly to its translated Analog counterpart is like comparing the computer binary code for a work of Shakespeare with the analog book and saying that this bunch of ones and zeros clearly has absolutely nothing to do with this work of Shakespeare.) |
