2. analog
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The Mood Was Ruined

I recently bought an analog set up and a few lps.  I have always been militantly pro digital.  I’m trying not to accumulate lps and trying to limit purchases to interesting stuff that may not be available digitally.  I have my lps cleaned ultrasonically.  My tastes are generally confined to Classical Music.

  Today I was playing a Columbia lp  that had just been cleaned of Charles Rosen playing late Beethoven Piano Sonatas.  Specifically I was listening to Beethoven’s last Sonata, Op.111.  The second and final movement has very long trills, great arcing trills that tend to dissolve into arpeggiated chords in the highest octaves and played at various shadings of the pppp range.  A great performance and recording can make you afraid to breathe because you don’t want to break the spell, and Rosen ( a noted scholar and author of the Classical period besides being a great musician ) had me transported there.

  And then it happened.  With perhaps a minute to go, as I was in rapture, a loud POP! and then the music stopped.  Apparently my turntable, a Technics direct drive, when it can’t track a divot in a groove, stops playing and the tone arm lifts up.  I grabbed a magnifying glass and there is a visible interruption of the vinyl surface.

  It was every thing that I have ever hated about vinyl crystallized in a moment.  
  This record was as presumably clean as it will ever get.  I just picked it up from the business that cleans it, and provided a new MoFi inner sleeve as part of the service .  I am not blaming the service.  I had never played the lp before getting it cleaned, but the other lps that I had cleaned the same day came back in great shape.

  I will never probably play this lp again.  It was like having great sex and then having the husband knock on the bedroom door with the stock of his shotgun.

  I am now listening to a CD of Jonathan Biss playing Op.111, but the magic of the moment is gone
  

mahler123
lwin's avatar
lwin
566 posts
 

Totally agree. The only thing worse than musicus interruptus is coitus interruptus.

bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,412 posts
 

I have CD's that exhibit digital "rot", the result being the music becoming completely chaotic. No format is perfect.

Your Technics direct drive turntable is not what "tracks a divot in a groove." That is the responsibility of your pickup and tonearm.

lewm
12,458 posts
 

In your desire to show your displeasure, which is understandable, some meaning was lost.  Are you saying that the LP was grossly defective or just dirty?  And what Technics are you using that still has autolift? I am not aware they have made such a one since maybe the mid-90s, which makes your TT pretty old. Whatever it was, the problem is not sufficient in magnitude or breadth to justify throwing the baby out with the bathwater, unless you never really wanted that baby in the first place.

ghdprentice
6,363 posts
 

Sounds like you are a true music lover. I noticed you do not have your system shown under your user ID. That would be helpful.

 

Unfortunately, once in a while you can get an album with an issue like yours… For me, maybe one in 250… of 500. I have 2,000 and maybe acquired a dozen over the years with a skip of big pop.

The other part of this is the quality of the turntable. The better the turntable, the less the surface noise and the better the recovery from problems. Still, you have to toss one out of every few hundred albums.
 

The issue is, especially for classical music, you need a really good analog rig to sound spectacular. It can. But, in this day and age, not sure tip toeing in is going to be satisfying for you.

My Vinyl system sounds fantastic, but you probably do not want to invest the kind of money I have in it. I think I am going to pull out a Mahler symphony on vinyl… you got me thinking.

edcyn
1,876 posts
 

The way I see it, your Technics record player has one heck of design flaw. To be sure, a piece of "whatever" stuck in a groove can be annoying, but there's no reason for the record player to suffer a tantrum/hissy fit over it. At the worst, the arm & cartridge should repeat the preceding revolution until either a power outage or Doomsday. Just as an experiment, if it is possible to adjust the amount of antiskate, turn it down a bit and see if the needle/tonearm will just bull its way forward past the obstruction.

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