Early Faint "Phantom" Turntable/Vinyl Signal???

This is very common and very normal.  Fuhgeddaboudit.

Yah, I've heard it before, but never knew what it was.  Last time I had a decent vinyl set up was in the early 2000s (TNT/Grasshopper/Audible Illusions) and remember it, but the rich vibrant knowledge base which is the internet was nascent at that time and it never occurred to me to look into the phenomenon.  If it's normal, I'm cool with that.  But what causes it?

I think it’s tape bleed. ??

Print-through from the original tape to the next layer and/or signal modulation from neighboring grooves. It’s also known as pre and post echo.

Its called pre-echo. Record grooves are originally cut into a very soft special wax. This wax is so soft it deforms easily. Sometimes if the grooves are not spaced widely enough apart the squiggles from the music being cut deforms the wax enough to create a very weak copy of itself in the preceding groove. If you watch a record when you hear the pre-echo you will notice when it comes around one full turn that's when you hear the original sound. 

Once you know what it is you will notice it happens quite a lot. Sometimes like Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall its almost like he sings "Sylvie" twice each time. Part of the charm of vinyl.

Appearing from the ether comes an explanation:

"I think what your are hearing is print through either from the original tape recordings or from the records themselves. It is like one revolution of the record difference between the faint and the full level? Sometimes it is one revolution of the reel of tape used to make the record. This phenomenon is actually on the record."

Actually Keith Herron supplied the explanation.

It gives vinyl its euphony. 

Thanks guys.  Love the knowledge base here.  I was listening to Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert and the passages are so quiet with so much space between notes, the effect was very obvious.  

Yep, Koln Concert is rife with the pre-echo.  I used to think it was all the wax master issue noted above, then I bought some favorite recordings as DSD files from High Definition Tape Transfers, and damned if the echo wasn't still there.  Tape print-through.

One of the more famous of 'tape bleed through' cases is the 30 inch per second tape lead in on a certain Led Zeppelin album.

In this case you got the straight poop, but when it comes to the Internet, trust but verify.

Tape bleed comes through very clearly on "Just a little lovin' " by Shelby Lynne  when she sings "This old world...."

Isn't this why tape should be stored "tails out" so the pre-echo becomes post echo (which should be less noticeable?) Anyway, this is what I was taught on my only recording project that used tape. We recorded live (i.e., mixed on the fly) to two track ½" tape at 30 IPS, and mastered the cd directly from that. (This was in 2002 back before the vinyl revival and before streaming and downloads killed the cd market.)