Vinyl runout grooves on old LPs.
Posted by: tonym on 03 October 2007
I recently managed to intercept a few dozen old classical vinyl LPs my uncle was about to dump. Sacrilege!
Most of them date from the fifties & sixties and they were all in a poor state, having been stored in a cellar for many years. I've since run them through my Moth Record Cleaning Machine, an incredibly tedious process, but it's restored most to an almost pristine condition, eminently playable. I suspect they haven't been on a turntable for over thirty years and the quality of the recordings are pretty amazing, especially considering their age.
Anyway, some of the oldest ones have a very eccentric runout groove, which I guess was there to trigger an automatic device to raise the needle off the record. This causes my cartridge to be thrown around alarmingly from side to side, and I'm fearful of it causing damage to the stylus and cantilever.
Any advice would be gratefully received. Am I being too cautious I wonder?
Most of them date from the fifties & sixties and they were all in a poor state, having been stored in a cellar for many years. I've since run them through my Moth Record Cleaning Machine, an incredibly tedious process, but it's restored most to an almost pristine condition, eminently playable. I suspect they haven't been on a turntable for over thirty years and the quality of the recordings are pretty amazing, especially considering their age.
Anyway, some of the oldest ones have a very eccentric runout groove, which I guess was there to trigger an automatic device to raise the needle off the record. This causes my cartridge to be thrown around alarmingly from side to side, and I'm fearful of it causing damage to the stylus and cantilever.
Any advice would be gratefully received. Am I being too cautious I wonder?