Some information for those of you who are wondering about the ticks and pops on your supposedly mint MFSL albums. MFSL had a 'reminder' that they included on the flip side of the Certificate of Limited Warranty that read: "We do not de-horn our metal parts in order to prevent damage to high frequencies and transients. It may be necessary to play this disc several times, with your stylus acting as a polishing tool, to eliminate random pops and ticks." My 'reminder' was with my copy of Cat Steven's Tea for the Tillerman which is on JVC vinyl and pressed in Japan. Not all MFSL albums come with this warning. I have mofi albums which sounded absolutely unplayable until they were polished by my stylus. I'm not sure I'm that keen on abusing my stylus this way [it makes a pretty expensive polishing tool] but in the end the ticks dissapear so I guess it is effective. If you buy used MFSL albums, don't dismiss the ones with the pops and ticks as being VG because in a few plays, they may become NM+ enjoy Bryon
That disclaimer came with my Anadiscs of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and Alan Parsons' Tales of Mystery and Imagination and believe me...no amount of play ever de-clicked them. Even Disc Doctor couldn't help them. Those are two of the worse sounding pressings I ever had. Sean
Probably just a copy by copy thing as far as excessive surface noise goes. I never did get an MFSL pressing I would categorize as noisy...just a tick here and there. My JVC copies are actually pretty darn quiet, the Anadiscs less so but still not bad IMO. One of 'em is an Atom Heart Mother, too. Just a random thing like it's always been I guess. Though every Anadisc inner cover I've seen included the info about not de-horning the metal parts, I never did get anything with the JVC pressings mentioning that. I got warranty cards and other stuff, but never any statement about not de-horning.
I have several MoFi's and all are pretty clean except Emmy Lou Harris-Ten Cent Moon in a Quarter Town. It's probably been played more than my others but it is still noisy. What are the pros and cons on playing vinyl wet? Years ago there were some "audiophile" systems for wet playing. I remeber a lot being said about once you play one wet you have to play it that way, but I don't know why. I have played some not so great shape vinyl wet doing CD-R transfers but have avoided playing any real collectors items or good vinyl wet.
When playing wet there's some sort of chemical reaction between the water and vinyl caused by the heat generated when the stylus tracks the grooves. It's the minute amounts of steam that create the reaction. This reaction causes tiny cracks to form in the groove walls. The water will actually fill those in during subsequent wet playing, but if you don't use water from the first play on, it'll be rice-krispy city. You can do it, but it'll be pretty noisy. The stylus pressure at the tip is actually pretty immense since it's so concentrated. IIRC, it was around a ton or something like that...which I'm sure generates quite a bit of heat. I know that seems excessive, but I've seen that information time and again. Any stylus actually deforms the groove momentarily as it passes through...it actually melts it to an extent, but the groove soon returns to its original shape. That's why you'll see those who advocate resting records for 24 hours between plays. I know it sounds like some kind of voodoo, but this is what actually happens.
That's why I prefer the Nautilus half-speed mastered recordings because of its more consistent quality. Unfortunately, it has stopped making audiophile records since the CD bacame the major music medium in the mid 80's.
Nothing could help my S & G's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and Jim Croce's "Operator"! And my Cat Stevens "Teaser And The Firecat"! In a word they are awful!!!
MFSL pops and ticks The two generations of MFSL vinyl pressings were very different. The originals were pressed in Japan by JVC on a high definition super vinyl that was 100% pure and originally designed for SQ4 quad LP's. These were by nature one of the most accurately predictable quiet pressings in the world as I can attest to having purchased 70% of the catalog back when and I can never remember having a problem with any of them and I was anal retentive when it came to surface noise, pops and ticks. The plant was conveted to CD manufacturing in the late 80's and LP manufacture had ceased from them altogether. When MFSL re-introduced the Anadisc in the early 90's they were a complete different animal. Pressed in house in California by MFSL and on 200 gram platters, this presented a whole other end result. Originally designed to be better they were actually worse as far as surface quality consistancy. You had a 80% chance your copy was going to have noise in some place or another and not just pops and clicks, random ripping noise and scuff noise which you never had or at least had a slim chance of with JVC pressings. This same problem is now in the hands of Classic Records. Once they switched their vinyl formula to 200 gram Quiex II all kinds of inconsistancy issues popped up. Apparently it is hard to press a quiet 200 gram record. Why designers keep insisting they get heavier is beyond me, especially if it is going to compromise surface quality. With noisy surfaces I am never going to hear the subtle differences that the higher weigh vinyl has to offer. I would much rather have a dead quiet 180 or 120 gram pressing. Now the issue of used or old sealed MFSL records come into play as they have here on this thread. Used mint records are visually verified but different stylus' all track at different levels in the groove wall and yield different results on noise level. Someone selling a mint play graded record (rare in itself) by someone with a Van Den Hul stylus to someone with a Shure micro ridge V15 is going to hear a different output from the same record, probably worse since the Shure MR is very sensitive to anything in the grooves and will reproduce it. Also if the original owner had a worn or partially worn stylus, the mint looking LP may have more pops and ticks than make sense for how it visually appears or have some groove degredation as distortion. As far as stylus polishing goes it is in fact a proven truth. Not so much so for pops and ticks on MoFi's. I have always found that the few I have encountered were firmly enbedded in the pressing and never went away. I have also never played a record wet but since acquiring my VPI wet cleaning vacuum system have notice that depending on the groove type, when I clean and vacuum an LP it sometimes sounds crunchy on first play. The second play is dead quiet if the record if the record has no defects or real noise. So what I do with any record now, even new ones, is vacuum clean it, polish play it (w/o listening), then inspect play it. This gives me a tru indication of the condition of the record. Also a little tip for you all, pointed wooden toothpicks!! What for you ask. If you hear a loud pop or two go by, note the stylus position on the record, remove it and inspect under a bright light. (The 40 watt end table lamp has been working great for me). Either directly above or on an angle, 7 times out of 10, you will see a burr or some obstruction that caused the pop. These can be any foreign material that has made it's way onto the record and stuck so tight that the vacuum cannot even remove them. Once spotted take the pointed toothpick and push against the burr in the same track that the stylus will trace it. You can feel the burr and hear it pop away. Then replay the passage to verify the pop is now gone. I find this works more than not and have physically removed a lot of pops that I would have normally thought to be perminant. I have never found this on a MoFi however and not to make this thread into a basic records clean and care one but wanted to share some of my tricks with a lot of fellow vinyl lovers. Last but not least!!! If I can't see or remove a pop/tick physically I do it electronically with a device made by SAE called an Impulse Noise Reduction System. This can be controversial as a lot of audiophiles do not like excessive circuitry in their phono signal path but I have teasted the transparancy and it takes no sound staging or imaging info out of the signal, just impulse noise!!, that occasional pop or tick that drives you up a wall can now be masked by this all analog device. Check out e-bay for them under SAE 5000 Impulse Noise Reduction System. Hope this can help someone salvage at least one of your LP's from annoying to a pleasure. All of my rambling will have been worth it then!!! Thanks for the ear (eyes rather!!)
Thanks for the MoFi history insight. Eye (ear?) opening & much appreciated! I've done similar things to remove pops. I'll usually put on a sturdier stylus/cartridge, find the pop, apply downward pressure on the headshell with a pencil and manually move the record back & forth (with the TT motor off - a slow "scratch") until the pop comes out or is reduced to a tick. Time consuming but it usually works.
I tried this on a... well I won't say which title it was... but it just damaged the vinyl. My problem MFSLs have hard white specks which are not trapped in the grooves but embedded in the vinyl. You can't wear them down and removing them leaves a hole.
Also remember guys that MoFi vinyl is (JVC pressings anyway) softer than most production run vinyl as it was close to or probably pure. I once found that scrubbing too hard with the VPI cleaning brush also can add noise as it can bruise the vinyl. Japanese pressings are of this nature also. Softer vinyl can be damaged easily by friction. The white spots you found on your pressings are permanent and nothing will resolve those except for the SAE Impluse Noise Reduction System I spoke of earlier. You really should check one out, they can be had for around $100 and are acoustically transparent. They are made to connect in a tape loop but I have just the ins and outs connected in my phono path. They can make or break a pressing as far as if you want to keep it or get rid of it for some random pops or ticks.
I agree, but how do you explain the UHQR pressings which were very heavy and quiet, and presumably JVC pressed?
From what I've heard, MoFi tried to get some of the JVC "super vinyl" into this country at one time but could not import it due to OSHA or some other similar regulations. Bummer that we don't have that formula around now! What will the regulators go after next?
Mine is the same. Bought new and have often thought of selling it. But I don't feel comfortable passing on such a POC. Same with my MFSL DSOTM vinyl. Both were bought new, DSOTM replaced by them waaaaay back when and still too noisey for these ears. I have other JVC MFSL's that are quiet so it is not my gear. Now lets see my avatar.
I can only deduce that the UHQR pressings were quiet due to the vinyl compound used which was either very ahead of it's time or scarce enough to be unavailable today. I never had never sampled one of the UHQR's. One today could only learn from the past, you would think that it could be duplicated but with all the noisy Classic Records pressings out now it seems unlikely.
So I guess we can conclude that you can make heavy vinly quiet, but only with the right kind of vinyl. John, since you seem to know a lot about vinyl I'm sure that you know about the "light bulb test" for vinyl where you hold the record between your eyes and a light source. Using the JVC MFSL vinyl you can see the bulb clearly as if through a filter. I read somewhere that this only happens with virgin vinyl. Anyway, if you do the same for many Japanese records one can also see the light through the vinyl. I had alway concluded that this "must be" the same formulation and generally the records were very high quality. Agree?
Undoubtedly!! Japan produced the quietest sounding vinyl in the world!! I sometimes wondered what they were mastering from. a lot of sources say they got copies or originals from the UK. All this back in a time where oil sources were scarce, US pressing plants were recycling returned records and pressing new ones with it plus diluting the formualtions I'm sure to get more counts out of the runs. Japan did the complete opposite and went for purity and it shows in the sound. I'll never forget my frustration with record noise when one day someone from a local record store advised me to try a Japanese import of a Beatles LP. It was dead quiet from start to finish and I never went back if I didn't have to. In all my years of record playing I still turn to a Japanese issue unless I can get a quiet UK or EUR copy. I find that the Toshiba/EMI Japanese pressings were about the best even among the others. Cannot ever remember a bad one of those. I can still remember some pressings from back then that had excessive ticks. Seems to have been longer running LP's, like the early Genesis stuff, +50 minutes on some of them. Other than that, more thank perfect. I also remember one of the keys to these better pressings was a longer stamping time. Nine to fifteen seconds compared to one to two seconds in the US. This would explain a lot of the smearing you see on a new record. Play on guys!!!!!!
I must say that I have never bought any of the later-generation MoFi LPs, and the only ones I have that have a few clicks in them were ones I bought used. In fact, I've been playing Gino Vannelli's Powerful People a lot lately, and it was a bit cruddy on first play...and I was almost ready to take it back to the store. A couple of plays later and it's quieter. It needs a better cleaning, but for now it will suffice.
Hi Gary, yeah I have that one. That's a JVC pressing and packs a lot of bottom end. I think they eq'ed this one quite a bit but not excessively so. Great album!!! The later MoFi's I refer to are the Anadiscs 200 gram.
I can't really tell if the Vannelli is EQed or not (I obviously wasn't there to engineer it ); however, I never liked the CD version of it, it always has sounded dull and dead to me. All the Vannelli discs seem to be that way, except that "Brother To Brother" sounds a little better, being the most recent. The MoFi picks up the low bass notes at the beginning of "Powerful People" a lot better than the CD does. I have not yet compared an original A&M LP pressing of it to the MoFi either.
