- Joined
- Mar 20, 2022
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M. Schumacher is my race hero & breath for F1. My dream has always been to be on a balcony rail at Monaco since I was very young. I have many F1 photo's from 60's ,70's up & a few special ones from Monaco. This year's opener was very entertaining indeed. You lived the dream & also lived thru a dangerous era of F1I worked for Garrard in the 1970s.
There was plenty of science engineering being done then and plenty of knowledge about how it all worked and its strengths and limitations.
For example they had a laser doppler vibration measuring rig (I think doppler is correct, it was the first I had ever seen) in the basement on a big block of suspended concrete to avoid the earth's vibration. One of the record player prototypes had a top deck mode with the arm mount area near an anti-node which meant the cartridge body could be excited and, since the transducing elements don't "know" whether it is the stylus of "stator" that is vibrating this could give spurious output. By clever interpretation of the deck-plate modes the engineer in charge of this rig worked out where a hole could be punced in the pressed steel plate to move the anti-node away from the arm mount - result much better performance for negligible cost in an item that would retail at around £15 back then.
What changed was the onset of subjective reviewing, probably perpetrated by Jean Hiraga, this admitted technically ignorant reviewers into the place and they were unable to separate the propaganda and marketing from engineering fact and probably by the mid 80s almost everything to do with playing records was forgotten or ignored.
It is actually still stupidly full of steady state reasoning being applied to dynamic systems which is just wrong - for example claiming the more rigid a pickup arm is the better it traces the groove, easy for a techniclly illiterate individual to believe but completely wrong.
If anything it is even worse now with the re-birth and ludicrously priced styling excercises.
I left the HiFi business to go Formula 1 racing full time in 1976 and I haven't read any technical papers about record players which give more insight into the engineering of them than was already extant then. Read contemporary B&K papers, we used their test records and measuring equipment, the science was well understood even if engineering targets with such a wide frequency range were hard to achieve.
It has got worse, if anything, facts ignored or not understood, reasoning false and so on. It would be very depressing if LPs were still the main source of recordings for music lovers.
Sorry to derail thread. I'll stop now