dsj@rabbit.UUCP (David S. Johnson @ ) (09/19/84)
My purchase of a CD player has greatly increased the amount of time I spend listiening to records, both CD's and (for comparisons) old LP's. On two of the latter, I discovered the following problem: On tracks near the outside of the disk, the grooves had gone so far out of round that they set my entire cartridge into rapid back-and-forth wobbling, forcing it to jump entirely out of the groove. This was quite visible (surprisingly, the Staunton 881S could survive a certain amount of this vibration without audible distortion, until it was actually thrown free). These records were OK when I first bought them, so what happened? (No, I wasn't storing them on top of the radiator, yes I was storing them vertically amidst my other records. One was even in a boxed set, the other members of which are still OK; the other was in a cabinet in a different room.) Since this was more than 10% of the old records I tried, I shudder at what may have become of my whole collection. This appears to be another argument in favor of CD's. David Johnson, AT&T Bell Laboratories