Mondo Knows Facts
One side of an LP holds hundreds of metres of groove
The spiral on a twelve inch record unrolls to roughly 460 metres The grooves are pressed so tightly that a stylus tracks a path thinner than a human hair. A needle tip can press with a force of tonnes per square centimetre on the contact point. That is why record care is mostly about dust and wear. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
RCA's seven-inch single spun at 45 rpmThe 1949 format had a wide centre hole so automatic changers could grip itThe long playing record arrived in 1948Columbia's microgroove LP turned at 33 and a third and held about 22 minutes a sideRecords outsold compact discs againVinyl passed CD revenue in the late 2010s and kept climbingMastering for vinyl cuts a physical grooveA lathe engraves a lacquer disc that is plated and pressedThe long-playing record arrived in 1948Columbia introduced the 33โ
rpm LP in June 1948Vinyl cutters fold deep bass into monoOut-of-phase low frequencies would throw the stylus out of the groove
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Tags: vinyl, physics, formats
One side of an LP holds hundreds of metres of groove: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The spiral on a twelve inch record unrolls to roughly 460 metres. The figure is taken from Library of Congress, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.