LP: Left Channel Drops In and Out


I just experienced something I have never seen in almost 50 years of listening to LPs.  

I was playing a vinyl copy of Bob James Grand Piano Canyon and side one played perfectly.  However, when I put on side 2, music only came from the right speaker, even though I could hear surface noise in the left channel.  I immediately panicked and thought something was wrong with my stereo, so I played part of side 1 again and it was perfect.  So I played side 2 again and the first two tracks played only the right channel.  When I played track 3 it started out with only the right channel, then part way though the left channel began fading in and out, finally outputting both channels normally for the remainder of the LP.  I repeated this several times with the same results, so obviously it was the record.  

Has anyone experienced this?  Warner Brothers must have had some type of quality control problem--is it a probable pressing problem, or electronic problem in the mastering?  Maybe some of these defective records slipped through before they caught them.  

Anyway, I will pick up another copy and see if it has this same problem.  Weird.
rlawry

Showing 1 response by atmasphere

Could happen. The cutter is an analog lathe, so it’s definitely possible that the master for the LP was cut when one channel stopped working.

These pressing masters need to be re-cut every so many LP's, so it's quite possible that in a large run one of them went bad and no one noticed.
This is really really unlikely. What is far more likely is that its simply a pressing defect.