Abnormal Grooves - why vinyl is better than CDs and MP3s

I'm trolling a little bit with that title obviously everyone agrees that CDs and mp3s have better audio quality than vinyl that's not controversial but there is a way in which vinyl is superior to CDs and mp3s and it's why I still have a record collection you see with a CD you just have one continuous track of ones and zeroes those ones and zeroes are encoded as divots in the CD and you just play with the order of the ones and zeros to create different CDs but we finally have got a bit more freedom a record literally starts off as a blank slate or at least a blank disc of plastic polyvinyl chloride or vinyl for short and you press patents into it and you could press one continuous spiral into the record like with a CD or you could be a bit more creative and this is why I love vinyl there's a rich history of people breaking with the conventional physical form of a vinyl record taking that blank slate and doing something different with it probably the most famous example is to do with the lock groove the lock groove is the needles final resting place so you know how record works the needle of the record player rests inside the groove on the record and the record spins around so the needle travels around the groove the groove spirals in towards the center and the lock groove is at the end of that spiral and I can illustrate how that works using this this is a kind of toy book hybrid that we bought for our daughter it's called the wind-up ladybird presumably because the ladybird is really annoying I don't know and inside the book you've got these tracks and they spiral in towards the center of the book just like the grooves on a record so the ladybird follows the track just like a needle following a groove but look you'll notice that the track loops around and touches itself forming a closed loop and so the ladybird just goes round and round and round in that final spot and it's the same with a lot groove and it's designed to protect the needle of the record because otherwise it might drift on to the sticker in the middle of the record and damages traditionally the lock groove is silent there's no audio encoded onto it it's just there to hold the needle but famously on the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper there is some audio encoded on there it's a kind of garbled loop of cacophonous sound and so if you listen to the whole album and you leave it running then that's what you're kind of drifting off to sleep to if that's what you've done so it's a bit I mean it's kind of creepy actually it's a bit of a mean thing to do to the listen if you if you ask me I would play that sound for you except that because it's the Beatles it's a bit tricky like I think this is almost certainly fair use but it's just copyright with Beatles stuff is really a pain to deal with so instead of that I've got an album called Evol by Sonic Youth and side to has a lock groove with audio encoded into it [Music] I never thought grief you can hear a repeating sound I'm sure that's record scratch or something else what's interesting is that the lock groove here is actually tucked up against the body of music instead of down here where you would normally find it and there's a reason for that and it's because record players often have a feature to again protect the needle which is that if it gets too close to the center the record player recognizes that you've reached the end and it will stop the record turning or lift the needle or in fact do both so if you want someone to experience your cool lock groove you have to keep it up here to stop the record player from terminating I'll show you how that works so on the other side you've got just a normal lock groove so it's going to travel towards the middle and it stops before it even gets there the next icon in the collection is matching tiny hankerchief by Monty Python the conceit is that you're buying a matching tie nangka cheaper and the record comes as a free gift with that yay it says free record give away with the Monty Python matching tile anchor two and side two of matching tie nangka chief is really interesting if someone talks to you about the grooves in a record you can smugly correct them and say it's not gross plural its grooves singular it's one single groove that goes all the way around except in the case of side two of the matching tank chief album because it has two interwoven tracks and it doesn't say that anywhere on the packaging they never talked about it in their advertising or anything like that so if you want one of the first people to get hold of this record it would have been very confusing because every time you put the needle down it's just random which track you're going to get on that side so let's see if we can make it work actually it's actually it's surprisingly hard to find because while both sides are side to so it makes it a little bit harder but if you look at the etchings I believe it's the what there's a one of the codes has a B in it and that's the one some deep history grunting background history let's try again it's total chance so background history okay a sketch that starts good evening mother mother and then background history again so there he go very confusing for the people who bought this record this one here has 8 into woven tracks 8 and they all contain fake horse race commentary naturally so the idea is it's a game so you pick what you hope will be the winning horse before the needle drops and then each one of the eight different tracks has a different winning horse so you hope that the track that's joseon is is your horse so there's no way to know which tracker on that they go what's interesting with this is you'll notice how quickly the stylus is moving towards the center of the disk and that's because every turn moves you forward eight grooves so the whole thing I'd lasts a minute or two it's basically a really tedious way of rolling a dice my absolute favorite example of into open tracks actually comes from this this is a toy from my childhood it's a talking robot so the idea is it's got all these cards in the back you take one out and you put it in the front and there's questions on the card so the question here is where they live and there's a picture of some pigs then it will actually ask the question that was genuinely where do they live I know it's not the clearest and then it's multiple choice so do pigs live in a cot a spaceship or a pigsty stuff one obviously spaceship I was try again that's right okay so see pigsty and so the way you're supposed to play with this toy is you're supposed to work through all the cards trying to get the questions right but that's not how I've played with it the way I played it was to try and figure out how it works like how can this toy talk like this predates the microchip it's amazing so I took it apart and I said I'm not gonna take this apart it's too precious don't break it it's alright because I've got another one on eBay recently so I can show you the insides and you've got all these levers and things that cause different buttons to be pressed on this voice box here you've got these six different buttons and those different buttons choose which of the six tracks get played on a tiny vinyl record inside so the toy is completely mechanical the only electric thing really is the motor that spins the disk and even the speaker it's just a cone attached to the pin like a gramophone record really amazing and because I figured out how this worked I was able to like make my own question cars to test my parents and it wasn't easy questions like where the pigs live it was hard questions like where have I hidden your keys and because I figured out the workings of it I realized that you could if you change the the you could rewire it so that it would speak backwards so one thing that's really funny is that the when it says it try again if you play that backwards it sounds to me at least like it's saying murder followed by the sound of gunfire so let me see if I can get that to work for you so the first thing to do is play it forwards I chose spaceship that time I was wait let me try again I'm not right and you ripped the batch out just before it finishes the loop and then we should get it backwards when we switch the battery around so that's my collection by no means exhaustive there's a link to a Wikipedia article in the description with a more complete list of examples of unusual groups like the record that plays from the inside out with good reason it's to do with the way that classical music tends to be arranged so have a read of that article one final thing before you go our radio show has received a second series the first two episodes have already aired and they're available on catch up a link in the description if you want to listen to those two more episodes to go live they go out at 11:00 p.m. on Wednesdays on Radio 4 so have a listen to those one of the episodes even includes the description of unusual grooves like I've shown you just now so that's it I hope you enjoyed this video if you did don't forget to hear it hit subscribe and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Steve Mould

Views: 473,767

Rating: 4.8470511 out of 5

Keywords: Explained, understand, PVC, polyvinyil chloride, LP, record

Id: yIoAYU_r0Uk

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2018