Vinyl - Hearing The Beginning of the Song One Revolution Earler

I've noticed this phenomenon since I was a kid.  I thought it was an LP-only thing as I don't recall hearing it on CD's made from tape masters.

It is adjacent groove wall bleed through, especially when cutters were pressured into using a low pitch to accommodate a long playing side and not using too much compression. It’s a compromise and an art to avoid it altogether, which is why some of the best remasters are now using two discs instead of one that allows a higher pitch with more space between groove walls. A classic example of this is The Yes Album’ opener, Yours Is No Disgrace.

Tape should be stored so that the extra tape ("the tails") are on the outside of the reel. This makes print-through more obvious during loud passages, where it is swamped by the desired signal.

But sometimes tape is stored "tails in", and a megabuck recording session is compromised by a pre-echo. The loud passage prints through onto a silent passage, where it is clearly heard. Joan Sutherland’s London recording of Lakme appears to be a good example.

At least, that is a plausible explanation. If it is true, the pre-echo should move closer to the passage; if the pre-echo does not move relative to the intended passage, then that would indicate a cutting problem. I have never bothered to time the interval, so I don't know.

There are a few articles on tape print-thru so it seems to be a thing. On the vinyl groove pre-echo, it must be playing alongside the actual music adding euphony.

The reason tapes are routinely stored "tail out" by professionals is so that the tape is not stored after having been fast-forwarded, which puts the tape layers under higher pressure against each other, leading to magnetic print-through. At the end of a recording session, the engineer lets the tape run at recording speed to it's end, rather than fast-forwarding the tape off the feed-reel onto the tape-up reel.