@mijostyn , though I have many LPs and many have some minor degree of warping, I honestly have never heard an obvious audible effect....perhaps I am not a good listener, or it just that the areas of warpage have never coincided with a musical passage that would make the pitch variation apparent...and i have never had a LP whose warp was SO extreme that it caused skipping or mistracking....just my experience
How best to eliminate LP warps
I own about 2500 LPs, and I like to think they're flat. Furthermore, I espoused the view that warped LPs ought to be discarded. But lately I have found 2 or 3 of my LPs that do have warps but sound too good and are too precious for the music recorded on them to throw away. So I am in the market for ideas on how to remove warps. I am aware that there was a device on the market that looked like a large waffle maker, to be used for warp removal. I think Furutech made it, but I never see it advertised these days. I am also aware of the DIY method of placing an LP between two glass plates and heating the ensemble. The question there would be how hot and for how long? Any suggestions are welcome, especially opinions on the efficacy of the Furutech. Thanks. Please no comments on vacuum hold down; I think it's a great idea but none of my five turntables has that feature.
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@jw944ts , you haven't lived until you've seen your tonearm take off:-) Any warp that can be easily seen without the record spinning will cause a noticeable pitch change if you are use to digitally stable pitch on record playback. It appears to me that given smaller warps and eccentric spindle holes we are use to a certain degree of pitch variation and our brains ignore it. If you are use to really stable pitch the irregularities become, I would not say obvious but certainly noticeable. A couple of months ago I was listening to Polini play Chopin and the piano was wavering. Sure enough the spindle hole was way off, a DGG pressing. |
So you’ve recently examined each and every one of your 2000 LPs, and you know for sure that only 5 have a detectable warp? I doubt it. Actually I too had that smug attitude toward the issue, until recently I detected moderate to severe warps in 2 or 3 LPs I do not want to discard. Which led me to start this thread. But oddly and amazingly both of the LPs that were most warped actually played pretty well, and I did not detect any obvious distortion while watching the stylus trace up and down over the warp. I do not agree with Mijostyn’s hypothesis that this is because we are used to speed aberrations in the vinyl medium. I really don’t know exactly how to explain it. The stylus did not take off into the air. The tonearms were respectively my Triplanar and a Dynavector DV 505. In both cases using high compliance cartridges, so that may have something to do with the traceability. |
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