Last time, I talked about how the weight of a vinyl doesn’t necessarily impact the quality of how it sounds. Okay, so what about rotational speed?
Some people swear that 45 RPM records sound better than those that rotate at 33 1/3. This is true if you’re talking about 12-inch records. Because the record spins faster, the stylus travels through more grooves per second. This means that the wiggles the stylus makes are more spread out, meaning that they’re easier to track.
Think of it in terms of the resolution of an audio file. Something that is encoded at 320 kilobytes per second will sound better than the same song located at 128. This explains why bands like Radiohead have released albums as two slabs of 45 RPM vinyl instead of just one that spins at 33 1/3.
More next time.
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