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whitem8
This is a crazy, but very intriguing method of deep cleaning vinyl! Crazy!





I have a vacuum plater that works very well. Made in China, it basically is a turntable with a vacuum. You use solution, and then lower the vacuum and it really cleans well.

The thing that gets annoying, especially in winter, is static electricity. I have tried those guns, when I was younger, and they didn't seem to do much. I have a new plater made from leather that boasts that if prevents static electricity. We shall see.

To what do you attribute all that static to? I never seem to have that problem.

I'm a solid nothing-sounds-better-than-vinyl guy, but wondered if anyone has checked ol' Neil's Pono device?

Neil and his friends say it's the cows teets, while this article says "not so fast"

[gizmodo.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2015-08-09 06:11 by Snoopy.

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Snoopy
I'm a solid nothing-sounds-better-than-vinyl guy, but wondered if anyone has checked ol' Neil's Pono device?

Neil and his friends say it's the cows teets, while this article says "not so fast"

[gizmodo.com]

great, just great...next we're going to find out there wasn't actually 4 dead in Ohio.

or Cortez wasn't really a killer .....



ROCKMAN

treacle, you don't have static on your vinyl? I am amazed, because I always have static on my vinyl. Even in southeast Asia where it is humid as hell. Lots of static. Especially now I am back in Michigan and have dreaded carpeting. I hate carpeting! Going to try my new platter mat today and see if that helps and ordered the vinyl glide solution that says gets rid of static.

I went back to vinyl a couple of months ago and I am so happy. Is not only the sound, is the whole experience.

My son is visiting and i love to ut a LP on and talk about it and look at the cover art, the lyrics poster,letting the vinyl go from start to end, etc...Just fantastic.

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shadooby

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2014Slayer

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whitem8
I would say there is a shelf life, as the chemicals could break down... I wouldn't risk it.

So is there a formula for making a disc washer formula? Or just distilled water?

50% isopropyl alcohol / 50% distilled water. It's what's in my D3 that I've had for years. Not sure where I found that recipe, but I made note of it back when.

The instructions booklet notes under warning: "alcohol and many commercially produced fluids will permanently age the rubber-blend mounts which support the stylus assembly and affect overall musical performance."

One of the biggest regrets of my life was selling off my albums (about 2,000 of them) 30 years ago with the advent of the CD. I did keep a few of my favorites and special ones but, dang!…wish ida known then what I know now!

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whitem8
treacle, you don't have static on your vinyl? I am amazed, because I always have static on my vinyl. Even in southeast Asia where it is humid as hell. Lots of static. Especially now I am back in Michigan and have dreaded carpeting. I hate carpeting! Going to try my new platter mat today and see if that helps and ordered the vinyl glide solution that says gets rid of static.

Yes, never a problem with static.

Hardwood floors and live on the west coast of Canada, not very humid.

I guess that's the difference.

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itsallovernow
One of the biggest regrets of my life was selling off my albums (about 2,000 of them) 30 years ago with the advent of the CD. I did keep a few of my favorites and special ones but, dang!…wish ida known then what I know now!

I know someone who did that as well and regrets it. Good news, and he's doing this, is you can buy a lot of the same albums you got rid of at vinyl fairs for an absolute song (pun possibilities?)...$1, $2 its pretty amazing.

So get yourself a turntable and get hunting cuz itain'tallovernow!

That is something I might just have to do....but what should I do with my 3,000+ CDs? I know....save'em like I should've done with my albums!

I don't understand the glorification of vinyl. Could it be just nostalgia? I do agree that vinyl outshines CD if it is a good pressing OK, but when it's not. No, no. I have lots of albums that are not so good or let's say I have only a few that are really good sounding and where the CD versions sound a lot better. I think newly pressed albums are good because they don't press so many. Most of my vinyl albums are from the 60's up until 1985. During the 70's many albums were pressed on very thin vinyl and those do not sound very good. Whether it depends on the vinyl itself or the mastering I don't know. Vinyl can sound very good. I have the Mobile Fidelity pressing of Sticky Fingers and that outshines all other LP's or CD's. Not only for the sound itself, but more becasue of the dynamics. If all vinyls were mastered and pressed like audiophile pressings I think vinyl is better but unfortunately they are not. Also vinyl albums from digital masters do not sound much, if any different to CD.

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Matt
I don't understand the glorification of vinyl. Could it be just nostalgia? I do agree that vinyl outshines CD if it is a good pressing OK, but when it's not. No, no. I have lots of albums that are not so good or let's say I have only a few that are really good sounding and where the CD versions sound a lot better. I think newly pressed albums are good because they don't press so many. Most of my vinyl albums are from the 60's up until 1985. During the 70's many albums were pressed on very thin vinyl and those do not sound very good. Whether it depends on the vinyl itself or the mastering I don't know. Vinyl can sound very good. I have the Mobile Fidelity pressing of Sticky Fingers and that outshines all other LP's or CD's. Not only for the sound itself, but more becasue of the dynamics. If all vinyls were mastered and pressed like audiophile pressings I think vinyl is better but unfortunately they are not. Also vinyl albums from digital masters do not sound much, if any different to CD.

all your points are valid. it just depends is the real answer. vinyl has the potential to be way better but technology now and in the future continues to narrow that gap. the nostalgia thing though is true. funniest thing is seeing the hipsters now buying vinyl...I think I read that vinyl outsells CDs now, although that may not be accurate.

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shattered

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shadooby

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2014Slayer

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whitem8
I would say there is a shelf life, as the chemicals could break down... I wouldn't risk it.

So is there a formula for making a disc washer formula? Or just distilled water?

50% isopropyl alcohol / 50% distilled water. It's what's in my D3 that I've had for years. Not sure where I found that recipe, but I made note of it back when.

The instructions booklet notes under warning: "alcohol and many commercially produced fluids will permanently age the rubber-blend mounts which support the stylus assembly and affect overall musical performance."

You'll be fine with this mix as long as you don't use it on the 78's.

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shattered
Does anyone remember or seen any 16 rpm's?

16 2/3 rpm records were used to lengthen the playing time available on each side of the disc. Lo-fi, but it worked on speech and other recorded material where fidelity was not paramount. The industry also used to record on 16" discs at 33 1/3 rpm. These were often used to transcribe radio shows (Bing Crosby, etc) for playback on local radio stations. I used to have a 16" disc recording lathe, and you can still find 16" turntables and tone arms long enough to accommodate 16" records. A 16" tone arm describes a more gentle arc than a shorter tone arm as it travels across the record, resulting in lower tracking error. So they are desirable even for 12" LP playback. Records are cut on recording lathes that travel tangentially, or in a straight line, across the blank disc as it cuts the groove in the disc. Tone arms travel across the record on a curved path. The difference between the lathe's straight line and a tone arm's curved path is tracking error. For a while back in the day, there were higher-end straight line tone arms, but most of today's mega turntables ($50,000 +) seem to have conventional tone arms.

I've always felt this way, whatever you use to play music on, it's only ever going to sound as good as the speakers you use will allow.

[thepowergoats.com]

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jamesfdouglas
I've always felt this way, whatever you use to play music on, it's only ever going to sound as good as the speakers you use will allow.

If your speakers are only allowing a certain level of sound quality,there may well be a problem.

Anyway,to make a long story short,for better or for worse,good speakers will expose a bad source and highlight a good source.

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Winning Ugly VXII

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jamesfdouglas
I've always felt this way, whatever you use to play music on, it's only ever going to sound as good as the speakers you use will allow.

If your speakers are only allowing a certain level of sound quality,there may well be a problem.

Anyway,to make a long story short,for better or for worse,good speakers will expose a bad source and highlight a good source.

The problem with determining what is a 'good' speaker is that speakers are not built to any standard. Recording equipment has standards. Theaters are set up to THX standards. Amplifiers are built to cleanly amplify a signal with as little coloration as the designer's budget will allow. But speakers...inexpensive, moderately priced, or megabuck speakers (a pair of Wilson Alexandrias will set you back $249,000)...are not designed or built to any industry standards. I'm a vintage JBL guy. I have a room attached to the garage where 6 pairs of JBLs are hooked up to 3 systems. Again, all by JBL, a highly respected manufacturer of the speakers most rock & roll records from the 70s, 80s, and 90s were mixed on. Some bands sound better on certain speakers, while other sound better on others. Floyd sounds best on a pair of mid-70s vintage 15" 3-ways, while Joni Mitchell sounds better on a pair of 10" 3-way near field monitors. If I want to listen to anything critically, I play it through a pair of 12" 2-way control room monitors. The point I'm making is that no one seems to know what a good speaker is. Bottom line is that if they sound good to you, they're good speakers. If they don't, they aren't.

NPR did a story about this book last night and I thought about you folks. I gave away my 78's. Hind sight is 20-20.

[www.nytimes.com]

Norman C. Pickering, Who Refined the Record Player, Dies at 99

Norman C. Pickering, an engineer, inventor and musician whose pursuit of audio clarity and beauty helped make phonograph records and musical instruments sound better, died on Nov. 18 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 99.
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His wife, Barbara, said the cause was cancer.
“I only do what I love to do,” Mr. Pickering told The New York Times in 1986, though that did not limit him much.
A man of intellectual energy and wandering curiosity, Mr. Pickering flew planes and designed solutions to help mammoth passenger aircraft manage vibration issues. He played the French horn because a baseball injury to his hand upended his aspiration to be an orchestral violinist. He studied the acoustical properties of stringed instruments, and he aided ophthalmologists by developing an ultrasound method for identifying eye ailments.
Record lovers, however, probably owe him the most. In 1945, Mr. Pickering, who enjoyed listening to records and was frustrated by the sound quality of recordings, developed an improved pickup — that is, the mechanism that includes the phonograph needle, or stylus, and translates the information in the groove of a record into an electrical signal that can be reproduced as sound.
Previous pickups were heavier and more unwieldy; styluses were made of steel, they needed to be replaced frequently, and the weight of the mechanism wore out records after a limited number of plays.
The so-called Pickering pickup (and later, its even more compact iteration, the Pickering cartridge) was introduced just as the favored material for records was shifting from shellac to vinyl, which had a lower playback noise level.
Originally designed for use in broadcast and recording studios, it was a fraction of the size of earlier models, and it replaced the steel of the stylus with a significantly lighter and harder material — sapphire or diamond — which lasted much longer and traced a more feathery path along the record. Because of it, records lasted longer and original sounds were reproduced with less distortion.
The difference “wasn’t just a little, it was magnificent,” Mr. Pickering recalled in a 2005 interview for an oral history program of the National Association of Music Merchants.
Norman Charles Pickering was born in Brooklyn on July 9, 1916. His father, Herbert, was a marine engineer who disapproved of his son’s interest in music.
“His father thought it was for sissies,” Mr. Pickering’s wife, Barbara, said. But his mother, the former Elsie Elliott, played the piano, and young Norman learned to read music sitting by her side on the piano bench. Her mother introduced him to the violin, starting his lessons at age 7.
As a teenager, Mr. Pickering hurt his right hand playing ball, so he turned to the French horn. (Its valves are played with the left hand.)
At his father’s insistence, though he would have preferred music school, Mr. Pickering attended Newark College of Engineering (now part of the New Jersey Institute of Technology) and after graduating went to Juilliard.
In 1937, he joined the fledgling Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, playing three seasons in the horn section, and in 1940, he joined C. G. Conn (now Conn-Selmer), a leading manufacturer of musical instruments in Elkhart, Ind., where he helped design instruments, including a Conn model French horn that has been in wide professional use.
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the C. G. Conn plant was converted by the Sperry Gyroscope Company to produce aircraft instruments, and Mr. Pickering spent the war years in a Sperry research laboratory on Long Island. The work sparked his interest in aviation and led to his vibration control designs for Boeing 707s and 747s.
Mr. Pickering, whose first two marriages ended in divorce, married the former Barbara Goldowsky, a writer who uses her maiden name professionally, in 1979. In addition to her, he is survived by a daughter, Judith Crow; three sons, David, Frederick and Rolf Pickering; two stepsons, Alexander and Boris Goldowsky; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In 1948, Mr. Pickering was among the founders of the Audio Engineering Society, now an international organization that disseminates news and information about improvements in audio technology.
In the 1970s, he worked in a laboratory at Southampton Hospital in Southampton, N.Y., where he developed his ultrasound diagnostic technique for the eyes. After 1980, he turned to his first love, violins, studying their acoustics; serving as president of the Violin Society of America; consulting for D’Addario, a manufacturer of guitar strings and orchestral strings; and building violins and bows.
Oddly enough, given the musical pleasures for living-room listeners that Mr. Pickering’s pickup engendered, the inventor himself did not envision it as a product for wide use; his aim was to aid broadcasters and recording companies. But as high-fidelity equipment grew in sophistication and popularity, demand for his pickups ballooned, and by the mid-1950s, his manufacturing company employed more than 150 people.
“It was a big surprise to me that the public took to this device as they did,” Mr. Pickering said in a 2011 oral history interview for the engineering society. “It was never intended to be a consumer product. It was a professional transducer for people in the record business. So we found that we were selling them right and left for people who just wanted to play records at home.”

[www.nytimes.com]