Vinyl pre-echo
Posted by: Alley Cat on 25 July 2018
I don't know what else to call it, but does anyone else ever hear this?
Basically when volume is pretty high you get a faint audible preview of the track to come in the silence between tracks.
I've always assumed some odd pressing issue gives a far lower amplitude signal in the silent periods which is picked up before the track proper plays.
This might shed some light:
Great link, thanks Tony!
The pre-echo in the silence is a minor irritation, but you have to assume it's affecting all subsequent grooves and colouring the audio signal. It may not matter if you cannot actually hear it!
Also, if the master is on tape, you get bleed through between tape on the spool and you can hear faint pre echo or ghosting sometimes... in my experience this is a lot rarer now than it was in the 80s because of digital recording and mastering techniques,.. but you can still hear sometimes on some older masters.
To add to Simon's post above, a lot of pre-echo is from tape and it's usually down to the tape stock and how it's stored. Some tape stock was prone to high levels of print-through where the signal stored on one section of tape would begin to "print-through" to the neighbouring layer on a reel of tape. Some of the more adventurous tape formulations that began appearing during the '70s and '80s were particularly bad here (and poor binders too, but that's a different subject). To combat against this, some studios would get into the habit of reverse winding the tape so it would effectively be stored upside down on the reel. This improved matters, but you needed to be careful to spool through and re-spool the tape before use
FWIW - there's virtually no pre-echo with direct metal mastered (DMM) vinyl.
Some of the Pink Floyd albums had pre-echo - a quite passage followed by a loud, bass, section would do it.
Indeed, the tape mastering leads to this in a way that does not discriminate. If you hunt out a CD of the same album you'll often hear the same thing. I have a couple discs where the next track is faintly audible during the fadeout of the current one. Not suggesting you go out and buy a CD to compare and troubleshoot and confirm that the most likely cause is the actual cause but you could.
I used to hear it all the time when I played vinyl. Since switching to CD and more recently streaming, I can count the instance on the fingers of one hand. Even today, when listening to some of my all time favourites, I still anticipate a pre echo at certain points, which doesn't arrive. Plus end of side compression, which I've also been thankfully free of since the late 80s, but I still remember how it sounded on some albums. And where it occurred.
You can hear pre- and post- echo from the vinyl cutting process and from the master tape (the longer it has been stored, the more chance of pre and post echo) and also crosstalk from adjacent tracks on multi track recordings. Crosstalk is also massive on vinyl especially at low and high frequencies. None of these things are an issue with digital. Haven’t played vinyl for decades. Don’t miss it either!
Brings back memories 
They have faded too much now to remember which lp's has pre-echo that I always heard . . . but I definitely recall the feeling of 'here comes the pre-echo!'
Was there some on DSOTM? I'm also thinking maybe at least one Beatles album -- White album perhaps? Abbey Road? Right before Come Together? Memory way too faded . . . .
I once borrowed a copy of Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief. One of the sides has concentric grooves so you get completely different material depending on how you cue the record. One of these concentric grooves has significantly more material recorded but both concentric grooves have to be the same length with one finishing in silence. I seem to recall that the crosstalk was quite clear on the silent groove, wack up the volume and you could almost make out the dialogue.
Beachcomber posted:Some of the Pink Floyd albums had pre-echo - a quite passage followed by a loud, bass, section would do it.
Pretty good description of all Pink Floyd music.
NathanJ posted:I once borrowed a copy of Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief. One of the sides has concentric grooves so you get completely different material depending on how you cue the record. One of these concentric grooves has significantly more material recorded but both concentric grooves have to be the same length with one finishing in silence. I seem to recall that the crosstalk was quite clear on the silent groove, wack up the volume and you could almost make out the dialogue.
Yes. I remember that too. I still have it in storage.
I, too, found it common on vinyl recordings, my memory suggests most common on early 1970s records, but not evident on CD or downloaded files, so the vinyl effect described in Tony2011,s limk rather than tape print through would seem to have been the most common cause, though of course that is not conclusive, not least as a tape artefact might have been edited out when creating digital copies.