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.

The record has been laying in a well used drawer for some time now and this is what happened the first time I tried to play it. I don’t need to give much of an explanation, just let your ears do the talking. The needle is clearly having a hard time sticking to any one groove and just ends up flailing all over the record. It’s brilliant. I couldn’t have set this up if I tried.

This is what happened the second time I put the needle on the record. Clearly it’s having a much better time at sticking in the groove but the degradation of the record is really showing. The sound is very harsh and there’s a great deal of surface noise.

For the past week the record has been in the lounge, leaning against the radiator - which apparently doesn’t warp and bend it like I thought it would. Anyhow, the degradation seems to be picking up again, the last few weeks were a bit of a let down. The overall volume level has dropped, and there is a lot of surface noise. Our lounge gets quite a lot of use with 6 people walking in and out of it all the time so no doubt there’s a ton of dust and dirt embedded in the grooves. There doesn’t seem to be too much skipping, but the odd jump here and there is present as is expected.

Another few days, another upload. This one is pretty much exactly the same as last weeks recording. My back room is freezing, so I thought that would have some affect on the sound but clearly it doesn’t. The poor disc has been in the temperature for days now. You just have to feel sorry for it. The only differences I can tell are that this weeks recording is slightly clearer than before. It doesn’t really make sense that this project seems to be going backwards!

Interesting: Here’s another update on the project. Only two things things I can really comment on and that’s the clicking at the beginning of the track. I have no idea where it comes from but it soon disappears and the other thing to mention is that this weeks recording is interestingly, unlike previous weeks, the whole track. The needle didn’t lose its tracking and skip over the grooves like it has done for a few weeks. Which is strange, as after time I expected this to get worse. But of course this just shows that this project is determined by chance theory and therefore can’t totally be controlled by the artist. Because the connection between the audio (the record) and the receiver (the needle) can be broken with something as simple as a heavy footstep the whole process of listening to a record can and inevitably will be altered every time the user listens back to a recording.

Here’s a picture of the waveforms again, the top waveform is of November 8th and the bottom is today’s recording. The volume levels have dropped considerably in the second and as you can see at the beginning represented by the thin lines that are rising out of the waveform there’s plenty of surface noise.

It’s been just over two weeks since I started the project, and in the early stages I still don’t want to do anything too drastic - that’s for later. So for now I’m just documenting what really happens when you do leave your slabs of ‘wax’ out of their protective covers, laid horizontally (one of the many things that a vinyl aficionado would never do), and just generally having a bad time - I’ve accidentally dropped plug sockets onto it’s docile body too many times to count. So here’s a nice recording that I just made, if you listen past two minutes thirty you’ll notice that the needle completely loses track of the grooves. So a track that was originally just over five minutes is cut in half.

On Tuesday night it snowed here, so I thought I’d take the opportunity and left the poor record outside in the snow for 15 minutes, whilst the snow was still falling. After the 15 minutes were up I brought it in to dry naturally, which I was sure would probably ruin the record a fair bit, and I was right.

Let this be a lesson to all of you record junkies out there. Snow and vinyl do not go well together.

Here is a picture of the waveforms in Logic. The top waveform is of the track dated October 26th and the bottom waveform is of the track that I uploaded today. You can see how the volume levels have drastically decreased in the newer track - after the snow - and how the waveforms go rapidly out of synchronization towards the end which was due to my needle having a hard time staying in the grooves of the snow damaged record.