On some records during some quiet passages you can hear the faint traces of upcoming sounds softly precede their emergence. Has anyone noticed this? What is this effect?
It's called pre-echo. The signal engraved on the adjacent groove wall is actually "read" by the passing stylus;though at a greatly reduced amplitude.At least that's the way I've understood it.
Sounds like in either case there is nothing I can do about it. I listen to a lot of very quiet music and music with great silent passages, like Webern, Cage, Schoenberg, and Morton Feldman. As passionate as I am about vinyl, this is one area where CD works. Too bad it sounds as dead as my great grandfather's genitals. I just got a mint copy of Arnold Schoenberg's pieces for piano. In comparison with the CD...well, there is no comparison!
As passionate as I am about vinyl, this is one area where CD works. Too bad it sounds as dead as my great grandfather's genitals.
Some forms of distortion are pleasing to the ear - since the Beatles engineers have been playing around with effects to enhance sound. Pre-echo occurs throughout the LP and may be one of the reasons for your preference. Remember that studios/musicians use reverb and concert halls are treasured for their ambient sound...pre-echo is a kind of ambience and may actually give more life to the music (to your ears)...
Shadone...I am a professional musician and can tell you flat out that pre-echo should not be there. It is not natural and is sometimes a serious fault. I believe this is from the storage of the tape when a the adjacent layer picks up the magnetic energy from its neighbor. Usually it can be heard during a quiet passage just before a louder one. I have heard pre=echo on a CD version of an older performance as well.
Stringreen: I thought so. It is the only plausible scenario I have heard yet. I have heard so many weird explanations ranging from satanic conspiracies to the aforementioned theory of engineers adding 'richness'. I listen to so much quiet music that it can be a problem, however there is no substitute for vinyl, IMO.
Actually, you are totally right. I checked out and I heard it on an older recording of a Bach cantata on CD. It is not a vinyl thing after all. I guess much of the time they eliminate it from the master tape when they make a digital transfer, thus it is less frequent on CD.
It is almost always groove-to-groove interference. This is easily verified by timing the amount of pre-echo. If it's 1.8 seconds it is a LP problem. Mag tape print-through is also real, but usually requires storage of the tape for years without rewind, and the timing will vary with tape speed and how much tape remains on the reel.
Pre-echo can be eliminated by wide groove spacing, but that drasticly reduces playing time. So groove spacing is dynamically varied as the record is cut according to the music signal amplitude. As always there is a compromise, and the grooves are kept as close together as possible, accepting a small amount of pre-echo that only audiophiles will complain about.
The first Led Zep album on LP has quite a bit of this prior to each song. Never heard the CD. I once read that it was because the singer was in one room and the mic was in another for echo purposes, and the mic was picking up the original vocal in real time before it registered on the tape from the speakers. Always thought that sounded funny but who knows?
I used to think this was a problem with my cartridge alignment or tracking error of some sort. It seemed like when I switched to the 10.5i arm from the 9 sig it decreased. Maybe it only seemed that way. Thanks for the explanations on something I've always wondered about.
Deaf_j...The playback stylus does not "read the adjacent wall". It is reading its current groove, but that groove was corrupted by the adjacent groove when the record was cut.
As to which channel is affected...it is horizontal groove modulation (mono) which is the problem. (Vertical groove modulation doesn't affect groove spacing). So, the pre-echo signal will be the mono component of the next groove.
Tails out A term describing a reel of tape wound with the end of the audio toward the outside of the reel. Tape stored in this manner is less likely to have audible print-through, since the tape must be rewound before playback. Any print-through that does happen to occur will sound after the original sound (instead of before), which is less problematic.
Rwwear...I take your point about rewinding the tape, although I don't see how this would erase any print=through.
However, whichever way the tape is wound the first few seconds of music will be next to the second few seconds, and print-through will be the same. The echo, be it groove distortion or mag tape print through, occurs both before and after, but it only becomes audible before the begining of the music because there is no sound to mask it.
I am no expert on Reel to Reel but tails out was used for mix down engineers for years to prevent pre-echo. It doesn't fix tapes that already have pre-echo and doesn't work for 4 track tapes that play in both directions. Pre-echo that may have existed on analog recordings can easily be fixed when mastering to CD in the digital domain by the way. This would explain why most CDs don't have it.
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