Mondo Knows Facts
A vinyl side trades loudness for playing time
Fitting more minutes on a disc means narrower grooves and a quieter cut The cutting stylus can only move so far within a groove, so engineers balance level against the spacing between turns of the spiral. A 22-minute side can be cut loud and wide, while a 30-minute side needs tighter grooves and less level. That is why long albums sometimes split awkwardly across four sides. 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.
Go further
More facts like this
Mastering for vinyl cuts a physical grooveA lathe engraves a lacquer disc that is plated and pressedVinyl cutters fold deep bass into monoOut-of-phase low frequencies would throw the stylus out of the grooveRecords got measurably louder and flatterHeavy compression raised average level while squashing peaksStreaming services turn loud masters downSpotify plays most tracks at about minus 14 LUFS, so a hotter master gains nothingThe loudness war flattened CD masters for two decadesEngineers squeezed peaks with compressors so their records would sound louderPeaks between samples can exceed digital zeroReconstruction filters can overshoot the highest stored value in a digital file
🎵 Musicfact 142 of 200
← → to keep reading, or swipe
Tags: vinyl, mastering, lathe
A vinyl side trades loudness for playing time: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Fitting more minutes on a disc means narrower grooves and a quieter cut. The figure is taken from Sound on Sound, 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.