Distortion on vinyl test press

[FirstLoveStudio]

Hi,

I've been asked to help a label who've had a test press come back on vinyl. 10 of the 12 tracks sound great but 2 of them are REALLY distorted. The material is folky - acoustic instruments - nothing too crazy. The first distorted track is solo female vocal - quite dense. The second distorted track appears to be ok until the vocal comes in at which point there is profound distortion.

The masters sent to the cutting plant were quite hot - perhaps not really that suitable for vinyl but most of the tracks have come out great.

There is a suggestion that the cause of this distortion is the MASTERING - not the cutting. To me the masters sound fairly consistent accross tracks

This doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

Has anyone experienced anything like this - some distorted tracks, others ok, on a test press???

Many thanks

[Bob Olhsson]

Peak limiting can exaggerate a distorted vocal and distorted vocals can cause mistracking. Using a hot CD master for vinyl has become common but in my opinion its not a very good idea.

You may need to look at your mixes and possibly low-pass some of the vocals if they were distorted to begin with.

[Paul Gold]

This is almost certainly a cutting problem. It is likely that the cutting job was difficult if the vocal is bright. Those modern cheap condenser mics are the worst. With a sparse arrangement distortion is noticeable at a lower level than on other types of material. It is very likely that lowering the level 3dB will give an acceptable result. Do yourself a favor and get an acetate reference.

[Bob Weston]

Paul's correct, of course.

I was surprised the first time I cut some lacquers with sparse acoustic instrumentation / female vocal only. I was getting playback distortion on the vocal and couldn't figure out why. After talking to a bunch of experienced lacquer cutters, I eventually took their advice and simply brought the overall level down. Problem solved.

There's some pretty complex high frequency information going on there with exposed or a capella voice(s) that the lathe can cut, but that will distort upon playback. Bring the level down.

bob weston
chicago mastering service

[Bob Olhsson]

Dropping the level is still a work-around for something that could very possibly be solved in the mix or overall signal processing.

[kenjkelly]

As you probably know, when cutting records the Bass is greatly reduced (RIAA curve) because loud bass would cause the cutting needle to swing into the adjacent tracks, which is why "Phono" inputs have huge Bass boosts to restore the missing Bass. I am just guessing but, since the old timers were not part of the loudness wars maybe they didn't have problems with the highs due to the normal headroom (14db-22db) allowed.

Going way out on a limb here, since we are talking about a needle with mass and acceleration/momentum, could the old tube and tape systems have given gentler compression such that the needle was not trying to stop and reverse direction as abruptly as modern brickwall limited audio might?

[Paul Gold]

Originally Posted by kenjkelly

As you probably know

I don't know any of this. Start with the RIAA curve. It is for maximizing SNR and recording time on the disk.

[joeaudio]

the old timers were not part of the loudness wars


The old timers invented the loudness wars.

Joe

[kenjkelly]

Originally Posted by Paul Gold

I don't know any of this. Start with the RIAA curve. It is for maximizing SNR and recording time on the disk.

The RIAA curve was for cutting analog records. The Bass frequencies would cause the cutting head to swing too far which would not have allowed the grooves to be close together. To fix that and to make sure that everyone's record player would reproduce the sound in the same way, the RIAA came up with a standard. Basically, after a mastering engineer got the sound right, they would pass the sound through an EQ .

Some folks (like my sister) confuse a "phono" input with "aux" inputs. Phono inputs apply the reverse of the RIAA curve to add back the correct amount of low freq.

This article explains it in a better way..
RIAA equalization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[kenjkelly]

Originally Posted by joeaudio

the old timers were not part of the loudness wars


The old timers invented the loudness wars.

Joe

. I'm in my mid 50's, so maybe we have a different view of old timers? I'm sure if they did it was just because they were going deaf and didn't mean it.

[Paul Gold]

Originally Posted by kenjkelly

The Bass frequencies would cause the cutting head to swing too far which would not have allowed the grooves to be close together.

Sounds suspiciously like recording time. The top end boost is to get that part above the noise floor.

[Bob Olhsson]

FWIW we cut some of the hottest 45 singles in history during the mid 1960s.

We did it for the very same reasons people create hot CDs today. When your record is being considered for exposure, being softer than the competition can work against you.