Record Wear Does Not Occur Below 2.25g?
Found an interesting article as I'm in the market for some new carts right now...
| quote: | It is commonly believed that increasing a pickup's tracking force causes a corresponding increase in the rate of record wear. This is not so. It's not tracking force that matters, it's contact pressure, and because vinyl has a certain amount of elasticity, increasing the tracking force causes the stylus to sink farther into the vinyl, thus increasing contact-surface area. The pressure increases much less rapidly than force. Yes, there is a point where excessive force will exceed the vinyl's elastic limit, causing permanent groove indenting, but with most elliptical styli, this apparently doesn't happen until tracking force exceeds about 2.25gm.
The thing that does the most damage to record grooves is cartridge mistracking. When a stylus is simply incapable of following the groove modulations, it exerts contact pressures hundreds of times higher than when tracking an unmodulated groove. The fact that a lousy cartridge may require 5gm of force to eliminate most mistracking is what gave rise to the idea that it was the high tracking force that ruined discs. It is, rather, the stylus's inability to stay with the grooves at any reasonable force that does the damage. With a cartridge that tracks fairly cleanly at up to 2gm, you should expect several hundred plays before a highly modulated disc is ready for the dustbin.
And when is a disc "worn out" anyway? Any heavily modulated LP will lose some audible cleanness with the first play on even the best and most carefully adjusted record player (footnote 11), but the amount of deterioration is much less on the second play, and diminishes almost exponentially thereafter. By the time it nears the end of its life, there is no audible sonic change from one play to the next, so it is impossible to say when it is "worn out." It may sound pretty sad, but 50 more plays probably won't make it sound much worse. For this reason, few discs ever get discarded for wear; they just get played less and less often (footnote 12), as the joy of the music becomes gradually more tempered by the irritation of the sound. (A caveat for buyers of used records.) |
What do you guys think of this?
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|||CHRISTOPHER THOMAS|||
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And when I do, it usually a bad pressing or slightly warped record to blame.
