Vinyl sounds better (shots fired)

Yes, a labor of love.  Maybe it’s my age.  They say frustration tolerance shortens as  you age and returns to that like a child.  I find myself now only tolerating the vinyl ritual when I cannot find a recorded performance on my streaming service.  

I recently read that almost every vinyl record since the early 1970s has been cut on a lathe that utilized a digital delay line for the source material.

@dgd What you read was false. What you are talking about is a ’preview head’ which was used on tape machines. Its output was digitized and then used as data to drive the cutter speed (driving a motor that drives the worm screws which advance the cutter head), allowing for variable groove width.

Meanwhile, the actual analog tape heads were sending the analog signal to the cutter head.

We used a similar system in our mastering setup, but since finding a preview head setup is pretty hard these days, we made a device using an Arduino and then played the project into it, creating a ’groove width file’. That was then synchronized with the project when we actually did the mastering. We did this because our Scully lathe was an older one with manual operation and didn’t have variable groove width built in.

@russ69 @ghdprentice Actually with many systems ticks and pops are caused by the phono section. The mechanism is if the phono section does not have good high frequency overload characteristics, ultrasonic or RF noise can overload it briefly, causing a tick or pop.

The way this happens is due to the fact that a cartridge has an inductance and the tonearm cable has capacitance. When you put the two in parallel an electrical resonance is formed in the same manner that FM stations are tuned in on a radio. With high output cartridges the inductance is higher so the resonance is just at the upper end of the audio spectrum or barely ultrasonic. The peak can be as much as 20dB. If the cartridge is a LOMC type, the peak is in the RF range up to about 5MHz and can be as much as 30dB higher than the actual signal.

Many designers simply don’t take this into account despite what happens when you parallel capacitance with inductance is taught in Electronics 101 in the first week. So there’s a raft of phono sections with this problem going back 60 years. A lot of audiophiles grew up with this problem not knowing this!

If this problem is taken care of in the phono preamp design you experience quite a lot less ticks and pops (I’m very used to playing entire LP sides with no ticks or pops at all, despite minimal LP cleaning- I just use a dust brush). If the cartridge is of the LOMC variety, you don’t have to mess with ’cartridge loading’ resistors either since how they actually work is to detune that resonance, which helps out phono sections that have this design flaw. But if the phono section has RFI and overload immunity you’ll find the resistors have no effect- its literally plug and play.

@atmasphere Thank you for clarifying this for me, and possibly others who have heard this. What you describe is completely logical, and the author of the information I read must have misinterpreted the "digital" part of the process to mean the final source material instead of the preview head. Makes much more sense in that way.

@atmasphere sweet, very educational, thank you!

Vinyl is a true analogue, not a digital approximation. "Vinyl sounds better than digital" is an indisputable fact, because it is true sound, not a computer-generated facsimile.