In the months since I told my Lenco story in Gramophone Dreams #79, two of my friends have bought L75s, and now they’re enjoying them more than their shiny movie-star decks. One told me he has put more than $2000 into a Lenco L75 he bought online for $350. When I asked how his hot-rodded Lenco compared to his fancy belt drive, he replied, “You can feel it. The Lenco’s motor pulls like a team of Clydesdales. It makes my belt drive feel like a pony pulling a child’s cart.”
When I asked him what he thought his rebuilt Clydesdale deck, with its new bearing, Jelco tonearm, and Grado Prestige Gold cartridge, was doing that his well-regarded belt drive was not, he replied, in a low, serious voice, “I think it gets more of the first part of a note.”
My response to that familiar-sounding observation was a long phone silence, during which I tried to imagine all the ways the first part of a note could disappear.
When low-level background sounds disappear—traffic noise outside the building, a subway passing below the concert hall, or a droning air conditioning fan—where do they go?
Likewise, when a record player plays flat instead of frisky and can’t carry the tune, where does the tune go? Did the front part of the note take it?
After my friend said that, I became desperate to know what electrical, mechanical, or electromechanical phenomena could cause the front part of notes to be conspicuously present on one record player and absent on another. This is what I call “subtractive distortion.”1
I began to speculate. Maybe each type of platter-rotating mechanism is producing its own signature form of speed correction, which I imagine as “stall-and-recovery” cycles of varying durations. Maybe these changes in velocity defocus transients, altering the texture of the sound. I picture these speed corrections as blending with and being masked by the texture of the player’s sound—as something that could dull those edges that define the front parts of notes.
And then I remembered the analog equivalent of
