Mala email RE skipping
Posted: Wed Jul 07, 2010 11:03 am
FYI.
By the way - did many of you get the picture disks? Georgous.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Guys, I really appreciate the feedback. This issue concerns me as all parties involved Myself, Transition Mastering, S.T Holdings and Optimal (which is one of the best vinyl pressing plants) have all gone the extra mile to make this record the high quality record I expected.
I had the Test Pressings (TP's) for DMZLP001 since january 2010 and played all tracks out continuously for the past 7 months. The TP's have always played fine. I make 10 TP's of everything and give them to other heads to check and play. I had no bad reports back. I triple check everything throughly and certainly wouldn't let something so major slip by without been fixed. For example MEDi 015 had 4 TP's made before it was perfect! The same happened to my track Level Nine.
I think its safe to say that most people know that Im a freak when it comes to vinyl. I play records pretty much everyday of my life.
When the finished LP was in my hand, its was checked again before being shipped out.
Since then I have listened to maybe 8 copies of both the versions of DMZLP001 at home and in the studio they are exact reproductions of the TP's. There was no issues. I used Technics 1200's with standard Statons, Shure N44-7 and Shure White Labels.
I also played Mountain dread, Eyez and Return II Space at dmz this saturday, play was the same.
Here is an email from Optimal (the Pressing Plant) to S. T Holdings the Distributor regarding the issue for anyone interested.
I've pulled the record from our archive and played it twice:
1st) Technics MK2, regular DJ pickup at 2g tracking force instead of default 3.4g and anti-skating set to zero: no skips
2nd) same turntable, hifi pickup at nominal tracking force of 1.5g and anti-skating = 0: no skips
The music itself has a lot of very low frequencies in it, almost subsonic. I really liked it.
It is important to understand that skipping is in many cases a result of resonance, sort of a resonance catastrophe. The mechanical system made up of pickup, headshell and tone-arm has its own resonance frequency and the movement (in fact the music) coming from the grooves introduces oscillation into this tone-arm system. Depending on the individual setup of each turntable, this can lead to various kinds of interference, including resonance mode. If the oscillation of the tone-arm becomes too strong it will skip.
Therefore it's hard to predict whether a record will skip or not since it depends a lot of the turntable components at the user's side. In order to have an early indication, our QC turntables are all set-up to zero anti-skating and we issue a warning when we suspect skipping.
You were right assuming that all pressing from one laquer family are the same. So the tps of DMZ017 should exhibit the same behavior as the DMZLP001.
Please keep us posted with you feedback as its extremely important to me that if you do have a bad record I'd like to sort it.
Thank you to everyone who has brought my record. Its been another learning curve and something I have enjoying putting together.
Respect
Mala
By the way - did many of you get the picture disks? Georgous.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Guys, I really appreciate the feedback. This issue concerns me as all parties involved Myself, Transition Mastering, S.T Holdings and Optimal (which is one of the best vinyl pressing plants) have all gone the extra mile to make this record the high quality record I expected.
I had the Test Pressings (TP's) for DMZLP001 since january 2010 and played all tracks out continuously for the past 7 months. The TP's have always played fine. I make 10 TP's of everything and give them to other heads to check and play. I had no bad reports back. I triple check everything throughly and certainly wouldn't let something so major slip by without been fixed. For example MEDi 015 had 4 TP's made before it was perfect! The same happened to my track Level Nine.
I think its safe to say that most people know that Im a freak when it comes to vinyl. I play records pretty much everyday of my life.
When the finished LP was in my hand, its was checked again before being shipped out.
Since then I have listened to maybe 8 copies of both the versions of DMZLP001 at home and in the studio they are exact reproductions of the TP's. There was no issues. I used Technics 1200's with standard Statons, Shure N44-7 and Shure White Labels.
I also played Mountain dread, Eyez and Return II Space at dmz this saturday, play was the same.
Here is an email from Optimal (the Pressing Plant) to S. T Holdings the Distributor regarding the issue for anyone interested.
I've pulled the record from our archive and played it twice:
1st) Technics MK2, regular DJ pickup at 2g tracking force instead of default 3.4g and anti-skating set to zero: no skips
2nd) same turntable, hifi pickup at nominal tracking force of 1.5g and anti-skating = 0: no skips
The music itself has a lot of very low frequencies in it, almost subsonic. I really liked it.
It is important to understand that skipping is in many cases a result of resonance, sort of a resonance catastrophe. The mechanical system made up of pickup, headshell and tone-arm has its own resonance frequency and the movement (in fact the music) coming from the grooves introduces oscillation into this tone-arm system. Depending on the individual setup of each turntable, this can lead to various kinds of interference, including resonance mode. If the oscillation of the tone-arm becomes too strong it will skip.
Therefore it's hard to predict whether a record will skip or not since it depends a lot of the turntable components at the user's side. In order to have an early indication, our QC turntables are all set-up to zero anti-skating and we issue a warning when we suspect skipping.
You were right assuming that all pressing from one laquer family are the same. So the tps of DMZ017 should exhibit the same behavior as the DMZLP001.
Please keep us posted with you feedback as its extremely important to me that if you do have a bad record I'd like to sort it.
Thank you to everyone who has brought my record. Its been another learning curve and something I have enjoying putting together.
Respect
Mala