Years ago Lucky dog posted that functionally a stereo groove is a mono lateral cut with a vertical difference component. As regards to why Decca did it like that, I’m not sure, but it could have been the path of least resistance from their mono cartridge designs. I’m not an expert but have owned a Super Gold.

Lastly, 45 and older mono records do not have different size grooves, but different stylus sizes allow you to play at different depths in the groove and maybe avoid previous wear and damage. This is why the vertical components can be cancelled by wiring it appropriately.Īlso being able to choose left or right separately works because, on a mono record, each groove wall contains all the information needed for proper reproduction, however, old players often wore one side of the groove, more than the other, so the less worn side may indeed play more cleanly. The cartridge responds to movement at 45 degrees both to the left and right opposing (at right angles to each groove wall). There's talk in the posts above of vertical and lateral, but a stereo cart is not arranged like that. To get a last audible playback or to do a salvation recording from a worned out record is always something adventurous in finding any tricks that will prove optimastically beneficial with minimalistic loss as possible from the groove retrieval. And a proper MONO cartridge with a right stylus on a proper tonearm will cope better than any thing else on MONO records. To imply that MONO is worned out anyway is a bit ludicrous. The OP didn't raised the MONO question in that sense.

But that's not always.Īnd so all this is not about MONO records, but about old worned out MONO records (schellac or early 45 or 33rpm ones) that have suffered from those old tonearms with heavy VTF and no anto-skate. Then the fact that the MONO records would be worned out because they would have been played on old tonearms with heavy VTF and no anti-skate device. You're talking about the MONO groove walls informations here. It always works.23:05Also being able to choose left or right separately works because, on a mono record, each groove wall contains all the information needed for proper reproduction, however, old players often wore one side of the groove, more than the other, so the less worn side may indeed play more cleanly. Find some good reference tones - like isolated guitar tracks from albums you like and then compare how your guitar sounds compared to the record.Īnd if you want it to sound better for your own enjoyment - just turn up the volume. Try to keep the volume the same so you know that your perception doesn't change because of the volume. Get the best studio monitors you can afford and listen to a lot of different music through them so you get to know the sound and the speakers. Volume makes a different to how we hear things and something that sound overly dark at home will likely sound balanced at gig volume.Īll of this is a journey. This is also why time and time again you will hear people say 'tweak at gig volume' for the exact same reason. So if you bring your Marshall Plexi with a 4x12 greenback cab to a rehearsal studio, dial it in and loving the sound, and then go home to your studio, dial up a Marshall plexi model with a 4x12 greenback IR you're almost certainly going to think that the real Plexi is going to sound better eventhough they would have sounded the same (or very close) if you mic up the plexi and play at the same volume through the same studio monitors as the plexi model. But turn the Black Sabbath up to the same level and you will perceive that it sounds a lot better. If you listen to a playlist with say metal classics from the 70s to the 90s and you first hear something from the 90s followed by some early Black Sabbath that was mastered in the 70s, it's easy to perceive the Black Sabbath one to sound pretty dull.

There's a reason why Spotify and all streaming services have a volume limit that you cannot exceed when publishing a song (and one of the goals of mastering is to take it as close as possible there) because if you play the same thing twice and one of them slightly louder - almost everyone will perceive the louder one to sound better.

This is true regardless what you play through, a tube amp at apartment levels is never going to sound as good as a tube amp at stage volume and a studio monitor at really low volume is not going to sound as good as a studio monitor turned up. Unfortunately though - volume is important.

But hopefully stereo