Vinylrecorder - Sibilance!?

[Retouch]

Hi, i have been busy learning the vinylrecorder for a couple of months now and when i went to cut today there is an audible harsh tail to the high hats. I have tried adjusting everything, from the RIAA EQ and stereo dials to removing the cutting head and making sure the stylus is clean and in position.

Any ideas??

Charlie

[opcode66]

Hmmm. That's a puzzler.

Off topic, did you buy your VR new from Souri? If so, when?

[Retouch]

Got it from Myshank

[tragwag]

ive found the head on the VR to be quite troublesome at high frequencies.
when I make a cut around 0 VU (ref +4dBu) things are fine, frequency response is mostly flat.
the second I bump things up above 0 VU, the mid high and high frequencies immediately distort.
All the VR cuts of others I've heard have been quite loud, up to +6 dB VU, with audible HF distortion.
I prefer to sacrifice loudness for a clean frequency response, and choose to cut softer.

[opcode66]

Are you using a low pass starting around 16K with a 6db/octave slope?

A number of cutters do this, primarily when cutting very loudly (in the red). If you didn't, the rise in volume on highs from the RIAA EQ Curve would commit distorted highs to disc. Even though phono pre-amps have the inverse curve which will bring the highs down, nothing can be done to un-distort what was captured distorted. It will just sound distorted at a lower level.

To avoid this, you do a low pass. You don't want to make an inverse of the RIAA for the high end. But, you do want to counter some of what it is doing because otherwise you will capture distorted highs at high volume.

At low volume, none of this matters.

RIAA gains up rapidly past 1k.

I find it curious that you are really only niticing it on the tail of a high hat. Instead of at the beginning when it is the most crisp. Makes me think there is some dynamic eq or de-essing going on and you are hearing the result of the release happening at the end of the sound when there is less intense burst of highs.

[Retouch]

The cuts i have been attempting are 10" @ 33. I have cut several tracks at around +4db that had no audible distortion before this issue. Nothing i do now seems to work. I'm even using older saved logic sessions that were fine the first time i cut and are now.. Not.

I have tried De-essers on the high end and always use a low freq cutoff as you suggested. I would agree that maybe the head naturally distorts above 0db if i hadn't witnessed perfect cuts above that. When i was being trained to use the lathe we cut 12" cuts of dance music @ nearly +12 and they sounded fantastic.

[Jccc]

This may be a guess but maybe the stylus could be dull?

[Retouch]

Stylus is near enough brand new and did sound fine before these last cuts.

[opcode66]

If you mess something up and damage the stylus, then you will usually notice a lot of hiss in the background. Or, you'll just get overall horrible sounding audio. Since you are saying that it only sounds bad at the tail end of hi hats, and not throughout the entire hi hat hit, it still makes me think it is processing on the high frequencies that is the culprit somehow.

A bad stylus would sound bad regardless where you are at on the timeline for a particular high frequency pulse like a high hat. Make sense?

[tragwag]

hmmm.
the head on the machine I'm using is probably a few years old, maybe it just wears out after a while?
I definitely believe that it can cut +12 when new, but maybe after a while it loses tolerance?
I don't know how or why it might do that, but it's just a thought.
Have you checked your signal chain for loose connections etc?

[David34]

High volume audio should be cut at 45rpm mate,..