[78-L] Record Noises - Identify and Understand Cause

[Jeff Lichtman]

It's fairly common for one side of a groove to be more worn than the other. The inside of the groove usually gets more wear because of skating forces, which tend to pull the stylus inward. When this happens, one of the channels will be noisier than the other. The simplest solution is to use only the quieter channel. This introduces other problems - vertical noise won't be cancelled when you play back only one channel - but these are usually easy to cope with. A lot of vertical noise is low-frequency, so it can be filtered out with a high-pass filter.

It's not necessary to do something elaborate like playing the record backwards. If you did play a record this way, the record surface would push on the stylus rather than pull on it, which would probably do bad things to the stylus and cantilever. To solve this, you could place the tonearm on the far side of the spindle, but that would mess up tracking (the stylus angle would be wrong). I don't know what it would do to tracking forces.

>This reminds me of something I once heard but have never attempted: the
>plausible notion that centripetal force exerted on the stylus will cause
>more wear on the inside face of the groove than the outside.
>
>Andrew in Luxembourg


                       -        Jeff Lichtman
                                jeff at swazoo.com
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