mrdecibelWe were shown a video of a stylus tracking a record ( recorded microscopically, and blown up on a large screen ) ... we saw little pieces of the record vinyl being torn away from the record, as the stylus passed over.
I find this very difficult to believe, especially because I can’t recall any other reference to this video, ever. Recording a stylus in a groove is notoriously difficult, and would have been even more difficult in the pre-digital era. Also, other videos of a stylus tracking a groove don’t show this effect,
such as this one here. (This video shows apparent damage after skipped grooves, btw, but that’s not normal operation for must of us.)
There’s no apparent damage shown in
this animation, either, but this isn’t a real-world representation of a stylus in a groove.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence that this claim is fiction is examining an ultrasonic bath after cleaning a bunch of records. Many people have done this experiment, myself included. To make the test meaningful, I used several different colored LPs that I first subjected to multiple plays, followed by a lengthy cleaning. If there were any basis to the claim, bits of colored vinyl would have been found in the bath. But they weren’t.
I’m not accusing mrdecibel of intentionally misleading us, however. Perhaps he just had a nightmare.
