Help? Problem With Holding The Groove On A Hot Pressing

Also try without anti-skating (and don’t use more that the tracking force)

@chakster Thanks. Backing completely off the anti-skating allows the cartridge to hold the hot groove.

I am still curious about why these hot grooves appear in the last tracks of some LP’s. I read somewhere that some mastering engineers would back off on the bass in the later tracks because of the changes in record speed or cartridge geometry that occurs as the record plays through a side and some, like George Piros (re: Led Zep II first release) would cut hot all the way through. I was trying to find the article and I can’t...

Is there any plausibility that these hot grooves found later in a side would be a result of the physics of cutting? It is intuitive to me that for any same low frequency that the groove would present as a slow "hill" in the outer grooves because of the faster speed and more of a shorter "peak" in the slower inner grooves?

You have the answer. So why continue beating the dead horse? Especially when said horse is a red herring. As in off the beaten track. As in you were on the right track so why go off it?

You have the answer. You had too much anti-skate. Backing off eliminated the problem. Therefore its related to skating. Nothing to do with mastering. 

Which by the way, never did make any sense. Mastering is what they do with the recording getting it into its final form. All the stuff you're talking about has more to do with cutting than mastering. Which not that that's not an interesting subject. Peter Gabriel gave a lot of thought to song sequence on his album So, which for artistic and emotional reasons ought to have saved In Your Eyes for last, but he knew the bass would be a problem that close to the end of a LP which is why we have it track one side two. So these things matter, just not quite the way you're saying.

Now back to your maladjusted anti-skate. The correct amount of anti-skate varies constantly depending on tracking force, angle, and degree of groove modulation. A smooth or lightly modulated groove with low tracking force requires very little anti-skate. A highly modulated groove with greater tracking force requires more anti-skate. (Modulated btw is the correct term. "Hot" is both wrong in meaning and unfortunately already taken as in trademarked https://www.better-records.com/ )

So normally the highly modulated bass that caused your skipping would have called for more anti-skate. That it didn't tells me your anti-skate was set way too high. Way too high.

A simple procedure for setting anti-skating that I’ve found to work well, at least with cartridges having medium to high compliance (which would include the Ortofon 2M Blue, although I have no experience with that specific cartridge), and which I’ve found to generally require little if any subsequent fine tuning by ear, is as follows:

1)Observe the cartridge from the front while it is in the groove of a rotating record and positioned somewhere in the middle of the record, on a musical passage that is lightly modulated (i.e., one that has relatively low volume and consequently does not have wide groove excursions).

2)Adjust anti-skating until deflection of the cantilever to one side (left or right) becomes barely perceptible, relative to its position when the stylus is lifted off of the record. Note the setting.

3)Adjust anti-skating until deflection of the cantilever to the other side (left or right) becomes barely perceptible, relative to its position when the stylus is lifted off of the record. Note the setting.

4)Set anti-skating to the mid-point between those settings.

5)Verify that no perceptible left or right deflection of the cantilever occurs near the beginning and near the end of the record.

As I mentioned earlier, after performing this procedure I have found that little or no subsequent fine-tuning by ear is usually necessary. And I have typically found that the procedure results in a setting that is in the vicinity of 50% to 60% of the tracking force.

This procedure might not work with low compliance cartridges, btw, with which I have no experience.

Regards,
-- Al

Thank you professor Millercarbon for shutting down a dialogue and keeping me on point.

@almarg Thank you for the procedure. I will try that.

Thankfully there are a few people in this group who aren’t crippled with toxic self-absorption.