Vinyl - Hearing The Beginning of the Song One Revolution Earler

That is the result of magnetic "bleed" in the layers of the master tape.

More likely it’s Pre-echo. When the lathe cuts a groove very close to the previous groove. You can hear it when there is silence.

There can also be bleed through the layers of magnetic tape from the analogue recording days.

I've noticed this phenomenon since I was a kid.  I thought it was an LP-only thing as I don't recall hearing it on CD's made from tape masters.

It is adjacent groove wall bleed through, especially when cutters were pressured into using a low pitch to accommodate a long playing side and not using too much compression. It’s a compromise and an art to avoid it altogether, which is why some of the best remasters are now using two discs instead of one that allows a higher pitch with more space between groove walls. A classic example of this is The Yes Album’ opener, Yours Is No Disgrace.

Tape should be stored so that the extra tape ("the tails") are on the outside of the reel. This makes print-through more obvious during loud passages, where it is swamped by the desired signal.

But sometimes tape is stored "tails in", and a megabuck recording session is compromised by a pre-echo. The loud passage prints through onto a silent passage, where it is clearly heard. Joan Sutherland’s London recording of Lakme appears to be a good example.

At least, that is a plausible explanation. If it is true, the pre-echo should move closer to the passage; if the pre-echo does not move relative to the intended passage, then that would indicate a cutting problem. I have never bothered to time the interval, so I don't know.

There are a few articles on tape print-thru so it seems to be a thing. On the vinyl groove pre-echo, it must be playing alongside the actual music adding euphony.

The reason tapes are routinely stored "tail out" by professionals is so that the tape is not stored after having been fast-forwarded, which puts the tape layers under higher pressure against each other, leading to magnetic print-through. At the end of a recording session, the engineer lets the tape run at recording speed to it's end, rather than fast-forwarding the tape off the feed-reel onto the tape-up reel.

Funny how things that we original vinyl users took for granted - pre and post echo - are being newly discovered and pondered by a new generation.

Thank you for all the responses. 

I have been making some changes to my system that made it much more resolving with a much quieter background. This is when this "echo" effect became really noticeable. I hear this on some of my best sounding records, some old but others are new releases from the original master tapes (I guess thats' the keyword :)) where a lot of attention to details is applied. My main concern really was if there is something wrong in my turntable set up, especially because it seems it happens around one revolution early. But it does not seem that is the case. 

Remember the Shelby Lynne album, "Just a Little Lovin’" that was an homage to Dusty Springfield? The initial release on Lost Highway was horrible, but Chad re-did it a while ago. A profound amount of pre-echo, to the extent it almost sounds deliberate. Top people involved in producing, mixing and mastering-- the late great Phil Ramone, Al Schmitt, and Doug Sax. First issued when Chad was still using RTI to press, reissued (probably no change in mastering) when Chad set up QRP. It was an "audiophile" type demo record several years ago.

Yup. Anyone who knows vinyl knows this. If you listen to vinyl but never heard it then you are just not very observant. Pre-echo is extremely common and normal. If you can’t hear it most of the time (pre-echo affects the entire LP on every LP) then you just aren’t concentrating properly. It is most apparent in the middle of songs when a loud passage begins right after a very quiet one. It is hard to hear when going from a loud to a soft passage. Often the best sounding LP vinyl has this issue because it means it was cut with a high dynamic range.

I recommend 12” 45 rpm with only a single track each side as a solution to this problem. LP is Long Play and is a compromised media but it can still sound gloriously good - never any digital jitter glare issues for example..

Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert on several different vinyl versions and the original ECM cd version had that issue. The Tower Records/ECM SACD version does not.