Blog Post

Record faults can and do happen, however your record player itself can be the culprit of playback faults. If your record is skipping, has distorted playback, or pitch issues these could all be related to your player rather than your record itself.

First we will look at the difference between older and newer records. Back in the “golden age” of records roughly between the 1950s and 1980s the main way to listen to recorded music was with a vinyl record, they were not considered the audiophile quality product that they often are today and they were designed as a mass market product. This often meant the priority was playback on everything rather than having the best audio quality or dynamics, albums were also designed around the length of a LP (long playing) record meaning that often they fit neatly into the roughly 22 minutes afforded per side of a record.

This all means that the majority of older records were designed with deeper, less wide and less varied grooves, this came with the downside of being less dynamic and being able to fit less music per side but the main focus was purely that there was music and that it was playable by everything.

Similarly as records were mass market commodity items so were record players, many of them were designed with budget and pretty much nothing else in mind, hence for proper playback without skipping or distortion these record players required “easy” to play records such as those described above.

Keep in mind that even at this time there were higher end record players and high fidelity records being produced but these were not what the majority of the market was using.

Now we fast forward to the present, the year is 2023 as I write this and the vinyl revival is here. Vinyl is a format praised for its audio quality and albums never made with vinyl in mind are being produced, they are long and dynamic and that's the way the artist wants their album to sound.

This creates a problem, we can fit more music per side onto a record but this requires less wide and often shallower grooves, we can add more dynamics but this requires more varied grooves often with large variation in depth. As technology has gotten better we have been able to cut these more dynamic records more easily during the mastering process and on proper equipment they sound better and can play longer than a record of the past (when played on the right equipment).

That text in the brackets, what does that mean? The right equipment? Well let's look at a couple of record players to figure this out:

Here we have two record players, the Crosley CR8005F-TN Cruiser Plus Vintage, and the Project Debut Carbon Evo.

The first thing we notice is these are incredibly different looking record players, they also have very different production stories, the Crosley has been manufactured in some unknown factory, whereas the Project Debut Carbon Evo has been handmade in one of Project’s own manufacturing facilities (they have 3 across Europe).

Further, the heart of the Crosley is not so much made by crosley instead it is a generic part that can be purchased at scale by various manufacturers for a little over $10 a piece (this was only the price I found, likely companies at the scale of crosley get these much cheaper)

Here is a quick comparison chart for these two players, this comparison also applies to all players that use this mechanism and the many variants of it:

The information below also applies to older record players which were not designed for more dynamic recordings.

This comparison is not at all exhaustive but it gives us enough information to understand these playback issues. We will cover each issue one by one:

Modern Records Skating / Skipping:

As discussed above, in order to have a more dynamic record or a “hotter cut” grooves sometimes need to be shallower or less wide, they also will be more varied. The Project turntable is able to account for this by using a number of mechanisms, firstly we have the anti skate weight, when a record is being played there is a natural force that pulls the stylus into the center of the record, the anti skate provides an opposing force to counteract this and allow the stylus to stay firmly in the groove. The Crosley lacks this feature and thus this force will cause the stylus to “jump” out of grooves that are too shallow or too varied.

Secondly we have our counterweight, the Project has a user adjustable counterweight that allows the user to set the exact amount of tracking force recommended by the manufacturer of the stylus, this means that the stylus has just the right amount of force required to keep it in the record groove, not too much as this would damage both the stylus and the record, and not too little as this would make the stylus more prone to “jumping” out of the groove. The Crosley uses a spring loaded mechanism that applies a rough amount of downwards force on the stylus, this is not user adjustable and is prone to fluctuations in force over time.

Thirdly we will look at platter size, the Project turntable has a full sized 12 inch platter which means that the entire record is supported during playback. The Crosley has a non full-sized platter, this means that a large amount of the record is not supported during playback.

Here we can see that this causes issues even in a clip from Crosley’s own marketing video. The record moves up and down in a wavy pattern as there is nothing supporting it, plus due to the lack of proper counterweight the stylus is applying excess force to the record. This both results in distorted playback as well as giving even more opportunities for the stylus to jump out of the groove and skip, especially if the grooves are shallower as can be the case in more modern and dynamic records.

Finally a feature that I didn’t mention in the table above is speakers, finally the Crosley gets a win right? It has speakers built right into the turntable and the Project turntable does not. However there is a reason for this, speakers work by creating vibrations and vibrations are movement. These vibrations both can get picked up by the needle causing what's known as “feedback” as well as moving the stylus enough to knock it out of the groove, remember the more dynamic the music the shallower the groove can be, plus the more dynamic the music the more vibrations are going to be caused by the speakers.

Project do not include speakers in their turntables for this very reason, as it is always best to keep the speakers separate and even on a separate surface if possible.

Distorted playback / Pitch Issues:

Our two main culprits here are the stylus and the motor. Firstly let's look at the different stylus / cartridges used in these two turntables.

The crosley uses a ceramic cartridge, these work differently to the more commonly used moving magnet and moving coil cartridges that quality turntables use. Ceramic cartridges are an older style of cartridge that rely on a piezoelectric pickup which must be physically deformed to generate the signal that the turntable outputs, this requires far higher tracking force and will still generate a less accurate signal as compared to a moving magnet or moving coil cartridge. Moving magnet and moving coil cartridges use magnetic induction to generate their signal and thus a far more reasonable tracking force can be used, these cartridge types are also able to perform a far more detailed reproduction from the record grooves.

Secondly we will look at the stylus profile. The Ortofon 2M red found on the Project Debut Carbon evo is an elliptical profile (note elliptical profile styli can also be found on cheaper turntables such as the Project E1 which carries an OM5E stylus).

The Crosley turntable uses an unlisted stylus profile, though we can likely gather that for cost reasons this will be a spherical stylus profile.

On the left we have a spherical stylus in a record groove, and on the right we have an elliptical. We can see that the elliptical is able to make greater contact with the groove as well as sitting lower down in the groove. This has a couple of benefits, firstly it further reduces the risk of skipping (when properly setup), it also is able to gather greater detail from the groove and finally as it is deeper in the groove it will suffer less from surface noise.

The Motor:

The motor is an incredibly important component of your record player as it determines both the speed and the stability of the speed that your record player can rotate a record at. Project like any good turntable brand knows this and thus have chosen a high quality motor that is able to maintain incredible consistency and accuracy, they even transparently list this accuracy as ±0.50% when playing at 33rpm and ±0.60% when playing at 45rpm.

The motor used in the crosley is part of that all in one assembly that we mentioned earlier, no specs are listed for the accuracy of the motor, given our previous experience as well as many others online these motors struggle with consistency and accuracy meaning pitch issues will likely be present as well as the phenomenon called “wow” which is caused by speed inconsistency and presents itself as tone fluctuations during sustained notes in a song which often sounds like the word “wow”.

Now that you’ve learned the pitfalls of these record players and why they can’t always play the more dynamic records of today you may be looking for an upgrade. Luckily we have everything you need to know about our range of turntables in a blog post Right Here.