vinyl drag

This is an audio document of the progressive deterioration that took place on the vinyl. Here I’ve stacked every recording that I made since October on top of each other, so they play in sync.  Creative fade-in and fade-out techniques were then used to create this track that starts from the first ever recording and gradually degrades over time to become the final recording I made.

I really love this recording, and it really makes this whole project so much more rewarding for me. I must mention that the motor on my turntable, being like everything technological, is prone to slight shifts in it’s performance and ultimately the speed that it turns the platter will vary slightly with every recording. I took a great deal of time getting the recordings as close to perfect synchronisation as possible, but due to the fluctuations that can occur from heat, and probably many other depending factors the record will never spin at exactly that same speed twice. This is most noticeable at the end when the piece ends a few times. You’ll hear what I mean.

Enjoy.

and with that…goodbye.

I believe this is a good time to end the project. The end of the road so to speak.

This will be the last time I document the records degradation on this blog. I’m now going to spend my time cleaning up the page so it’s worthy to be presented as my end of year piece. I’m going to be uploading a couple of recordings that I made that you will have never heard before, along with a montage of all 16 recordings.

Inspired by a scene in a movie I watched on Friday night, The Boat that Rocked, I began to wonder whether vinyl would withstand being immersed in water for a long period of time. So last night I put the record in the biggest wok I had in my kitchen, filled the whole thing with water and left it to sit over night.

I’ll let you listen to the results. I am amazed.

Revelations:

It turns out that the recording made last Saturday was with some faulty audio cables. No wonder the track could barely be heard. Anyhow here’s the recording for this week, with a fixed cable. I still don’t understand how the record has survived this long. I guess vinyl is slightly more resilient than I first thought. Ah, and you might think that the last minute of the recording is fabricated but it’s honestly not, the needle jumped from the silent part at the end of the record back into the grooves all by itself, twice.

You may think your speakers are turned down real low when you listen to this, but in fact the overall volume level of the track has dropped dramatically. This is recorded at the same volume level that it has always been recorded at. I think Vinyl Drag may end very soon at this rate.

Here’s the waveforms in sync shown in Logic. On top is the recording from today and underneath is the untouched original track recorded back in October. The dynamic range has drastically fallen and the clicks, pops and noise that has risen due to the degradation has made the underlying track almost invisible.

The recording posted yesterday (March 04th) was actually the second recording I made that day. The first was similar to January 28th in that the needle didn’t want to stick in the groove of the record and just moved about at random. In this recording you can hear this process happening.

It’s Vinyl Drag Wednesday! Here’s the upload for this week. It’s getting pretty ruined now and I’m really interested in how the sound looks in Logic, the waveform is very compressed and flat, with no dynamic range. However, I haven’t put any processing on the track whatsoever, and it is recorded in the same way as it has been the whole project. It seems that with degradation comes reduced dynamic level.

If this project serves any practical purpose at all so far, I think it would be that you should never let hairspray get anywhere near your record collection. As this recording clearly shows; hairspray and vinyl just do not go well together. The outcome is severely crunchy and nasty.