In addition to the regular CD, Collector’s Set, LIVE-CD and -DVD-Video, Stockfisch is pleased to announce the release of "Water Falls" as a Double-Vinyl LP of uncompromising quality (180g vinyl, DMM-cut, detailed booklet).

An experience in a class of it’s own for all friends of the analogue LPs.

The adjoining picture shows the DMM-cutting stylus (SX 82) in action. One can see the thin transparent tubing providing the helium cooling for the coils.

For the vinyl mastering process two stereo pairs of identical signals are needed. These signals must have a time offset of accurately half a turntable rotation. When cutting at 33 1/3 rpm this offset is exactly 0.909 sec. The signal arriving first will not be cut but serves as a control for the feed screw mechanism of the stylus. Thus the required space for the groove is calculated for the signal that will run through the cutting stylus 0.9 seconds later.

The required space for the groove on the copper plate is determined by various parameters, e.g. gain and phase correlation. At the time of analogue tape machines the difference between preview signal and cut signal was generated by a tape deflection between two repro heads. Today we are cutting sound material delivered mostly on digital masters and therefore we normally use a digital delay for this purpose. For the disc mastering of this vinyl we used the master files of our harddisk workstation in 24bit quality instead. In the audio workstation we mounted the two stereo pairs on a 4track EDL with the exact time offset to get preview and playback signals.

To convert the audio from digital to analogue domain it is established practise that we use high quality D/A converters by Daniel Weiss Engineering. One can see two technically identical devices for converting preview and playback signals. The studio version is called GAMBIT DAC1, the audiophile model for home users was named MEDEA.

Two adjacent grooves with a lot of space between them (approx. 100µ land) tell something about the music: On the left a quiet part containing nearly no mid frequencies, the groove on the right shows heavy modulation with powerful mids - a signal, which will strongly challenge the reproducing stylus.

The left groove shows a sudden increase in the depth of cut, e.g. an e-bass string attack. Later, during playback, the stylus’ flexibility will be tested severely at this point.

More informations about Vinyl-cutting/DMM disc-cutting you´ll find here: Pauler Acoustics.