Vinyl foibles

I feel sorry for us if we end up depending upon AI for factual information. It only knows what’s been written and entered on the internet without editing or referee. A hodgepodge of thousands of different opinions that will eventually take the place of real investigative work and finally also actual controlled experiments. For example, ChatGPT says yes, the stylus causes static charge . Because the vast preponderance of internet entries say it does. Because this is an erroneous belief that persists. If ChatGPT existed 1000 years ago, it would have told us the sun revolves around the earth or that bloodletting is a good treatment for fever.

I write poetry and I presented one of my poems to chatgbt to test it. Nothing is written about that poem on the internet and yet chatgbt did a superb analysis. It can reason and come to conclusions that no one has ever before come to. How? I don't know.

Just to test against my bias I presented a poem by another poet who has not been reviewed or written about. There is nothing for chatgbt to find on the internet. It also did a superb analysis of her poem. Okay, it didn't say anything bad because it is programmed to please. But take the pleasing away, it was still able to do an awful lot of "thinking."

My older son writes poetry every day, and he uses Chatgpt just as you did, and he likes the interaction.  I am not talking about that kind of interaction.  I am talking about going to Chatgpt or other AI services for scientific or medical information.  When I was doing my medical training, we as students, interns, and residents were taught certain things by our assigned mentors.  These tidbits of information were dutifully stored into memory and repeated to students and interns whom we later taught ourselves.  Over time, many of these "facts" came to be subjected to good scientific testing and were shown to be wrong or at best only partially correct.  That is how science and medicine advance.  If rigor based on performing well designed clinical studies that are then peer reviewed or controlled lab experimentation is never applied, because someone can coerce others to a certain point of view by quoting Chatgpt or other AI, then we will not only fail to advance, we will go backward.  Need I cite just about any public comment re vaccines or "chronic disease" ever made by our current Secretary of HEW?  For many other uses, AI is fine I guess. (I have argued against it on the basis he is risking his unique way of saying things as a poet with my dear son, to no avail.)

I'm going to try to pull us away from chatgbt.

My next vinyl foible is that my records do deteriorate. I play them many times and they're perfect then they pick up ticks, skips, etc. You could say that some of that is static, but these problems on the record repeat in the same place, so it's not static, which changes depending on the weather.

I treat my records really well. If I make a mistake and drop the stylus accidentally ont the record, I remember. It doesn't even happen once a year. Of course, I try the degritter, but certain ticks and skips remain. To make things more strange, they tend to happen at the beginning and ending tracks.

One might assume that my cartridge must be misaligned. But I use a professional protractor, a battery operated scale for the cartridge weight, and the VPI Fat Boy is an excellent tone arm with all the basic adjustments, which I use. So it's all a mystery to me why my records become damaged.

One last piece of data. I have records that are more than 50 years old and which have been played on a $199 Teac with a $69 cartridge (seventies' prices) and I never changed the stylus. I wasn't aware I had to. Nor did I adjust the tonearm. I wasn't aware I had to, if it had any way to adjust it. I have so many records from back then that never picked up any damage other than groove wear.

One more strange piece of data. I picked up Jacintha's "Here's to Ben." It sounded perfect the first few plays. Then it started picking up all sorts of ticks. I think it was on soft vinyl. Somebody mentioned PVC, but I don't think records are made from the same material as PVC. I read an article by a writer who visited many different pressing plants, and he said each had its own recipe for vinyl. So vinyl is not the same thing.

I bought a Jacintha album on 180 gram vinyl and it picked up all sorts of noise. When I used the Degritter most of the noise went away, but the last band was scratched somehow. I bought the same album and it scrathed in the same place. I don't remember anything happening to either record. 

Vinyl strangeness.

@audio-b-dog 

Let's face it, static gets on to a record, whether from rubbing paper sleeves or something else (scientific basis the triboelectric effect with vinyl being one of the worst materials).

Static of itself won't be audible unless it discharges through your cartridge.  Very unlikely. 

But it will attract microscopic, charged particles of dust (whether diamond or air borne).  These will stick with an electromagnetic force that defies gravity - 10 to the power of 36 times bigger (scientific basis The Standard Model of particle physics). 

Will your passing stylus collide with them?  Yes.  Will you hear an anomaly?  Probably, the magnitude depends on whether your platter / tone arm mechanically exaggerates the disturbance. Ivor Tiefenbrun marketed Linn as minimising the disturbance by extremely tight tolerances in bearings, etc..

Will the stylus knock the dust out of the groove?  Probably not.  So you are stuck with it until you discharge the static with, for example, an ultrasonic cleaner.

Even they can't fix mechanical damage like scratches. The second law of thermodynamics kicks in - on average, chaos increases.