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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

All the turntables in my life as a kid had built-in calibration, in the form of four rows of repeating black/silver squares on the side of the wheel, a light flickering at the mains frequency, and a little dial to adjust the turning speed until the row of squares corresponding to your current combination of 50/60 hz DC and 33/45 RPM appeared to stop moving. It was a very clever trick.

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You had access to nicer turntables as a kid! That was a distinguishing feature between the more "serious" music hobbyist and the person who just wanted to play some tunes.

I haven't messed around with a turntable in over 20 years but these days, only the supposed "serious" music hobbyist would be using a turntable and I'd think anyone making a turntable that didn't have this adjustment would be laughed out of the market. What are you going to tell me next - they're also using belt drive, a plastic needle, and a tone arm with a non-adjustable counterweight?! :)

My dad was a recording engineer, so he knew where to go to find the sweet spot between "this sounds great" and "this sounds insanely fabulous but requires a second mortgage".

And yeah honestly I'm surprised you can get a turntable that isn't made for the audiophile market any more, but the one shown in the video for this app sure does lack any fine speed adjustment. Just a little button labeled 33/45.

> And yeah honestly I'm surprised you can get a turntable that isn't made for the audiophile market any more

It's because of the other re-emerged market for vinyl: the "not-so-enthusiastic" collectors, who just want the album "on vinyl" to say they have the album "on vinyl" or maybe "in every possible format"; or because they love the band and the vinyl is just what you happen to get when you buy the special collector's edition box-set; or because they want to display the vinyl album cover somewhere visible in their house as if it were a poster print; or because they consider "a vinyl collection" to be an aesthetic decor item, like some people consider a full bookshelf to be an aesthetic decor item.

A lot of these are people in their teens/20s who don't actually think that vinyl sounds better, so don't have much enthusiasm for actually listening to the vinyl release (as they're mostly buying new vinyl, and these tend to come with a code for a digital copy as well.) So if they bother to buy a turntable, it's the $30 one they say at Urban Outfitters. They know they're just listening to the vinyl as a novelty experience, something they're only going to be doing a few times — and so they don't want to waste too much money on it.

Damn! I hadn't even considered that. You've opened my eyes to a world a never knew existed.

I would think that any turntable that allows for adjustment of the speed of the motor would have this already (based on my limited experience with turntables from decades ago). So, nice little app, but if it shows you the error of a non-adjustable turntable, it won't have a lot of practical applications.

For turntables which lack the inbuilt strobe but have the calibration pattern on the edge, you can also download a strobe app for your phone and use that to accurately measure and tune your turntable speed.

We have replaced a lot of stepper motors with a more refined version of this using stripes and a photoreceptor. Printers for instance. Surely there must be turntables doing the same thing?

And for those that don't have that, a strobe disc can be downloaded and printed.

On a quartz deck like the 1200 mk2, the strobe is also quartz right, not mains? (Otherwise the strobe would be far less accurate than the motor..)

Same here, so I was scratching my head about the need for this. For the turntables that for some reason didn't have this (one example would be one I built myself) you could get cheap strobe discs which you just put on the turntable, kind of like a tiny record.. start the turntable, and you would immediately see if it was in sync with (in this case) 50Hz.

I never knew what the heck those squares were for!

Just thought they were some funny aesthetic choice from the 70's and 80's.

Thanks for giving me the definitive answer for something that has always seemed odd to me.

My Dual turntable from the 80ties is regulated by a quartz crystal. This thing calibrates itself. :-)

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