I'm new here and was referred to this Wonderful World of Vinyl Wisdom by a vinyl mastering engineer I use regularly. He told me you guys would be the surest bet on solving the problem I have.
So here it goes: I ordered a lacquer rip (wav) of a section of a song that had some pitch wobble issues on the first test pressing. I asked the project's vinyl mastering engineer (not the person who referred me here) to have a look at it and run it through Izotope. He told me the issues were way less prominent but still there to some degree. Here's his screenshot:
The answer I got from the plant to this was the following:
"Slight vibrato/wobble from lacquer rip are related with small jumps of electricity (it’s never stable 50 Hz in electrical outlet) which causes little differentials in rotating plate during cutting.
This analogy variance is our limitation and best what we can provide assuming that vinyl is perfectly centric."
Now my humble question to you guys is whether what the cutting engineer at the plant is saying is acceptable per se for a professional vinyl plant and whether it's also an acceptable explanation for the wobble issues detected in the screenshot?
Also – and I have no idea if this is relevant for this kind of problem – my go-to vinyl mastering engineer thought the original digital vinyl master employed a bit more limiting than he would put on a vinyl master, but he wasn't able to say whether this could be a source of the pitch wobble problem (as well) or not.
Thanks so much for your help on this!
And if this is the wrong forum, Mods; please feel free to move me and mine!
Cheers,
naive