Turntable Pitch Problems Seem To Go Away When Using Heaphones

Naptown Rob said:

Good deal. I'm curious as to how the speed checks out now...

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i ran the same app and it came in at 33.18 RPM, so faster but still a little slow. to my ears, sounds fine though. if there's still any fluctuation in speed, its not something i can hear... one of the records i played last night was a bit pitchy, but noticed the pressing is pretty badly off center... the others i played sounded good.

listen to acoustic piano or vibes for pitch

Solo Piano or Vibes will reveal a pitch issue pronto.

petes'picks said:

Press that "6Ch Ext In" button on the front once you run your ArtDJ outputs into the 6Ch inputs. If am remembering correctly only the Volume knob will work and all other processing is bypassed. I have a AVR4800 I play arround with as a amplifier only, I thought the phono pre amp and rest of pre amp to be pretty decent, tuner not so much.

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Hey man, started noticing some weird pitch stuff still going on with certain records (particularly with guitars using a good deal of delay/tremolo... piano passages were oddly enough fine). Ran the DJ Pre into the 6Ch inputs and boom... sounds so much better to me.

Not sure exactly what that means, but I'll take it.

If most records are okay, but a few have pitch issues, you might just have some off-center pressings. It doesn't take much to make an audible difference in pitch. You'll notice that the effects of an off center pressing will be considerably more pronounced in the inner grooves.

To me, off center records are the bane of vinyl. Unfortunately, they seem to occur quite frequently in newer pressings. Nothing can ruin a nice 180g audiophile pressing on beautiful virgin vinyl more quickly than a careless hand in a pressing plant. You can always try to file the spindle hole to align an off-center record, but I prefer to return off-center records whenever possible.

If the fluctuations in speed are uniform throughout a side, it's more likely to still be a TT speed issue.

marcmorin said:

another issue could be phase issues within the room

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That's what I think it is. Pitch wow is often attributable to needle bounce. Reflections off the walls will render the pitch wow more obvious than with headphones because the mids through headphones are not as intense as they are when reflected off the walls. Add phase shift, Doppler distortion and other room effects and you have a whole collage of reasons why you should be using headphones more often.

Either that or the U-Turn knows when you're using headphones and is just messing with your head.

ripblade said:

That's what I think it is. Pitch wow is often attributable to needle bounce. Reflections off the walls will render the pitch wow more obvious than with headphones because the mids through headphones are not as intense as they are when reflected off the walls. Add phase shift, Doppler distortion and other room effects and you have a whole collage of reasons why you should be using headphones more often.

Either that or the U-Turn knows when you're using headphones and is just messing with your head.

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I wouldn't think the room is causing the issues... It's more likely to be revealing them. If you are playing music at a healthy volume and abruptly mute your receiver, do you hear any lingering echo in the room? If the pitch from the speakers changes slightly as music is playing, this might cause conflicting "beat" frequencies with the lingering echos in the room that the speakers had emitted milliseconds prior. This may make pitch issues more apparent, and unpleasant. Does this make sense to anyone?

soundandligh said:

Hey man, started noticing some weird pitch stuff still going on with certain records (particularly with guitars using a good deal of delay/tremolo... piano passages were oddly enough fine). Ran the DJ Pre into the 6Ch inputs and boom... sounds so much better to me.

Not sure exactly what that means, but I'll take it.

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In that mode you have bypassed the pre-amp on the receiver. My 4800 sounds wounderful when I run mine in that mode. Not sure if you need any of the pre-amp functions, if not then running it thru 6ch inputs will yield a much shorter signal path and more accurate sound. Maybe one of the IC chips or transistors are leaky in the pre-amp and is causing some issue. Be sure you have stereo button selected, I find most surround modes that upgrade stereo input cause all kinds of ping pong effects I dont like at all.

petes'picks said:

In that mode you have bypassed the pre-amp on the receiver. My 4800 sounds wounderful when I run mine in that mode. Not sure if you need any of the pre-amp functions, if not then running it thru 6ch inputs will yield a much shorter signal path and more accurate sound. Maybe one of the IC chips or transistors are leaky in the pre-amp and is causing some issue. Be sure you have stereo button selected, I find most surround modes that upgrade stereo input cause all kinds of ping pong effects I dont like at all.

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I don't need any of the pre-amp functions with my setup, so i think I will definitely leave it hooked up this way. In addition, I added a record weight to my setup, and played with speaker positioning a bit. I'm much happier with the sound now.

I've also noticed that I have a TON of off center pressings in my collection. I've been reading up on that and have slowly been modifying the most noticeable ones by carefully enlarging the center hole. I've had pretty good luck with this. Its a real bummer that pressing plants can't seem to get this right.

Ultimately, I think this was a combination of a ton of weird things going on that amplified the imperfections of some of the records I have. Again, thanks for everyone's help in getting this figured out.