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Worst record labels for "cue burn"

J

jefflaurence

I uncovered a giant box of some great old records..most of them were ex radio station copies, and were still in the green shucks (trivia: what was the name of the company that made many of those green record sleeves? It was based in New York State)

Anyway the cue burn on most of these is real bad..but some were way worse than others. What were some of the labels you remember as being the worst?

The copy I have of The Letter, by the Boxtops is worst..on "Mala". And close second is the single version of Light My Fire by the Doors on "Elektra"
 
Early 70s CBS 45s on plastic cue-burned after three or four plays, even with tonearms that were properly balanced and decent cartridges/styli. Mac Davis, Chi Coltrane, Simon & Garfunkel. CBS must have changed pressing plants in the mid to late 70s because their 45s went to better vinyl. Then again, didn't every station have at least one jock who cue'd the song 30 times before it was played on the air. It was like they were sawing wood. Any wonder why some of those 45s in your collection have that nice mechanically generated white noise on the first three seconds of the song.
 
CBS were bad, including their whole group like Immediate (Small Faces) and Date (Peaches & Herb.) Amy-Mala-Bell (Box Tops, Toys, "Lovers Concerto") were bad. But I think the worst were Mercury - Spanky & Our Gang, Lesley Gore, early Ray Stevens etc. Basically they were good for one undamaged cue with the prevalent viscous-damped Gray arms and VRII cartridges of the day.

I would watch the engineers at WKBW sit there, on alert, during a lengthy bit. Artie would be having a conversation with Danny Neaverth about something. And throughout, the operator would be slipcueing the next song, ready to let fly at the punch line. Every five to ten seconds he'd release the record a little to make sure it was still cued. Fifteen or twenty times, over and over and over. The RCA arms with the proprietary cartridges were a lot easier on records than the GEs.

Those manila shucks were available in several colors, like yellow/buff, red, and blue....but the majority were green. I bought a bunch in several colors....probably about 15 years ago, and I can't recall the distributor.
 
There was one brand of record "shuck" that a lot of stations used..it was named after the small town in New York where the company was based. And you are right about Mercuy Bob...whew they were bad. Remember how badly cue burned the Blues Magoos record got after about two cues? The viscous damped tone arms with the VRII cartridges were the worst.
 
As a rule, plastic pressings were easily cue-burned. CBS product, while sounding great on the first few plays, would burn quickly. I'd seen a few of theirs on vinyl in later years and those were better quality.

Capitol, with the ridge around the label, was virtually indestructible as I recall.

Bell/Amy/Mala was pretty bad. Plastic pressings for the most part. After it evolved into Arista it wasn't much better.

WB/Reprise would cue burn as well though not as bad as CBS.

ABC would go back and forth between ok and bad, they weren't all on good stock vinyl like RCA and MCA (is Decca is Uni is Kapp, remember the ads?)

A&M radio copies were vinyl, consumer copies really cheap plastic IIRC. A&M was one vinyl I'd hear cue burn.

Mercury/Polygram was pretty bed as well.

I think the worst of all were Energy Crisis pressings (late '73- mid '75). The price of oil had skyrocketed and the manufacturers must have been scrambling to cover the cost without doubling the price of 45's. "WOLD" and "Cat's In The Cradle" by Harry Chapin both sounded old with crackles and pops even brand new.
 
Speaking about the Energy Crisis -

How many, especially albums, do you remember from that era where
you go to grab a hold of the edge of the record to take off the turntable and instead of it popping off the spindle it would seem to
be stuck and in the process lifted half the record straight up at 90 degrees? Wonder the record didn't snap in half. They were so
flimsy and 'light weight' back then.

Contrast that to a box of original old 78's I have from the '40's - You sling that bad boy across the room and you could inflict some serious
damage.

Hey, thinking about 8track tapes now --
Did anyone ever wrap one end of the tape coming out of the cartridge and drive off leaving it behind? Just wonderin' how many miles it's good for.
 
Capitol, RCA and Verve-Forecast 45s were quite good, but by far the most resistant to cue-wear were Motown pressings. I have several including Brenda Holloway's "Just Look What You've Done" from 1967 that lived in control rooms for years and are still very playable with minimal noise.

Sometime around 1970 Capitol started using the European-style non-slip thing with the little bumps around the periphery of the label. That made their 45s harder to slip-cue, because the friction made the record want to rotate with the turntable. The ridges were added to correct a flaw with 45 rpm records dating back to their introduction in 1949 - slippage on drop-type record changers. Especially with the little bakelite RCA Victor plug-in attachment changers, the ones with the red spindle caps, if you stacked more than two or three records the weight of the pickup would cause the very lightweight records to slip against each other, causing wow - and in some cases stalling the record entirely. The bumps locked the records so they would all rotate together. (Theoretically.)

It's interesting to note that 45s almost didn't survive the mid-50s. They were originally an early-1940s idea dusted off by RCA during a corporate war with CBS in the era 1945-1950 which included radio network talent raids by Bill Paley at CBS and rival color TV systems. 45 sales had dropped badly through about 1955, and in 1957 the Crescent Industries factory in Chicago burned down - that was the company that produced almost all the RCA 45-only changers. With stereo coming in, RCA was actually considering dumping the 45 single. Rock n' roll and Top-40 radio saved it!
 
Years ago I asked a sharp promo man why this was happening. He said many of the promo copies were on virgin vinyl, but the commercial copies were on cheap, reprocessed stuff. At one point, the 45s from Indiana were all on the good vinyl, but the east coast plant had the junk. I would go out of my way to get the good copies, or else they were terrible. And not only from cue burn, but from lots of pops and clicks on the cheap stuff. Many of the LPs also had terrible sound due to cheap vinyl. I tried to get a clean copy of a Cliff Richard song on, I belive, Rocket label. I had 3 of the LPs and not one was clean...all had pops due to the cheap material.
 
Savage said:
It's interesting to note that 45s almost didn't survive the mid-50s. They were originally an early-1940s idea dusted off by RCA during a corporate war with CBS in the era 1945-1950 which included radio network talent raids by Bill Paley at CBS and rival color TV systems. 45 sales had dropped badly through about 1955, and in 1957 the Crescent Industries factory in Chicago burned down - that was the company that produced almost all the RCA 45-only changers. With stereo coming in, RCA was actually considering dumping the 45 single. Rock n' roll and Top-40 radio saved it!
Click to expand...
And the hits just keep on comin'! I agree with the barrister of the board, Motown 45s were well-pressed and it seems Stevie Wonder 45s were pristine. Rare Earth was another Motown subsidy that wore well. Capital 45s, primarily those with the ugly orange/red/black logo and speed bumps, but also those with the classic yellow/orange swirl, survived repeated cue-ing. WYSL Buffalo used quick-start 12" QRK turntables, with an ingenious upgrade: The felt was removed and in its place, canvas. No felt build-up in the grooves. Styli seemed to last longer. Seems any 45s in my collection from WYSL Buffalo have very little q-burn. There was little need for most of the 1400 Boss Jocks to slip-q 45s or LPs because those turntables came up to speed so quickly, about an eighth or sixteenth of a turn.

As Savage has recounted, the 16" RCA turntables at KB were archaic. Only the back turntable had a remote start, a mercury rocker switch that looked like it was shade-tree engineered on the countertop to the right of the RCA board. Heaven help you if you accidentally brushed over it while moving a cart or the copy book.

But overnight guys who ran their own board could make the 16" RCA tables sound tight without having to resort to slip cue-ing. It took some practice and forethought. Besides, it was a pain to slip-cue a 45 on a 16" turntable. The flip side of those felt turntable pads were cork. Never used the cork side. KB's combo/jock studio at 1430 Main Street had 12" QRKs after NABET compromised and allowed the jocks to run their own board and music (through a new but clunky McMartin board) while engineers ran master control and all content on tape and carts through the classic RCA board.

Later, KB became all combo using a spiffy McCurdy board and snazzy Technics instant start direct drive turntables when the NABET engineers agreed to a contract that provided job security in exchange for attrition. After that, all music was played off ScotchCarts. Gummy labels, worn pressure pads and rattling metal tension bars not included.
 
That plastic is styrene. Worst labels for me for cueburn. Bell/Amy/Mala, Arista, Columbia Terre Haute and Pitman plants. Mercury styrene was another major offender. United Artists styrene was another bad offender. A&M styrene was short lived. Best records for longevity were Mercury vinyl, Capitol, RCA vinyl. In between, MGM Records and Motown Records were mediocre. Hence, the admonition to "Cue It Once" Cole's Record-Velope was the well known radio station sleeves. I still have a lot of them.
 
I found the thicker the record, the more cue burn issues. And most all of the Motown records were thin.
 
The bad quality vinyl of the '70's energy crunch was the reason the station I worked for at the time started carting up currents. It was hard for MOR formatted radio stations to get record service after all we didn't generate the record sales that a top 40 station did.

I heard a rumor that the record companies used to recycle old records. They went into the vat label and all, holy impurities! I remember taking out a brand new RCA LP and hear clicks and pops the first time it was played. It must have been that recycled stuff. The thin RCA LP's were called Dynaflex.
 
The song that stands out in my mind for bad cue burn was Wild Cherry's Play That Funky Music. It was on Epic, a subsidiary of Columbia. So I guess that goes along with what most are saying.
 
Columbia had the better vinyl in the DJ copies...I remember the poor quality pressings back in the early 60's (they were the first to go at WNIA)
 
Carting up records to avoid on-air cue burn and scratch must have become SOP, at least in decent-sized markets, by about 1972. Every station where I worked that played the hits in upstate NY, either CHR or AC, was carting up not only currents but recurrents and oldies. That was true of WHEN, WKBW, WAXC, and WBEN and I also saw similar-sized libraries of carted singles at WGR and WBBF. In all those stations they'd keep at least one copy of every vinyl single and album they got, and kept it carefully stored, so they could re-copy it cleanly if the cart ever jammed or broke. But those records never got played directly on-air.
 
We had every record on cart when I was PD at WHEN..but we did a weird process. We recorded the record flat onto a 2 track Scully tape machine. On the first track was the full fidelity mono track and we played it using the "sel-sync" head (used the recording head as playback)..on the second was completely wet Fairchild reverb..then we would put the reverb track through a UREI LA3-A compressor, and use the regular playback head so the reverb was slightly delayed...then mixed both tracks together when we went to cart. It sounded way cool.

The "record-velopes" was the name of the shucks..made by the Cohoes Carrybag Co. Of Cohoes, NY. Coles as mentioned did, indeed make a green shuck..they were based out of Chicago, but close enough to be a winner. To prove some folks have waaaay too much time..check this link http://crossedcombs.typepad.com/recordenvelope/misc_sleeves/page/2/ and scroll to s ee the Coles green shuck and near bottom to see the "record-velope"
 
I also have lots of the old Record-Velopes made by the Cohoes Carrybag Company as well. At the small station I worked for, our cart machines were not quite up to music duty. We mostly had early Tapecasters and Telco cart machines and one Gates Criterion deck.
 
As a record collector, you might (or might not) be surprised to that is WAS actually Columbia/CBS that manufactured the Amy/Bell/Mala singles through their custom pressings division. They would continue through the first few years of Arista before Arista switched to RCA for their vinyl pressings.

CBS 45s have ALWAYS been pressed on notoriously bad polystyrene. Much of it recycled filler.

On pressings from the mid-late '80s, you could hold one to the light and see with the light shining through the disc that the vinyl was actually RED.

Capitol and Motown (prior to it's merging with MCA in the '80s) had the best vinyl.

RCA's Dynaflex vinyl was pretty controversial. It was THIN and had hardly the best dynamic range - even for commercial grade vinyl. But RCA made a MASSIVE investment in the vinyl 'biscuits' used to press the Dynaflex LPs. The fix? They just simply stopped mentioning Dynaflex on the labels. And the Dynaflex stock was still used on RCA LPs (as well as many Arista and other RCA manufactured labels well into the early '80s. In the late '80s. RCA actually made an even THINNER vinyl LP, just BARELY thicker than an Eva-Tone soundsheet for their last vinyl run from 1988 to 1990.
 
Most of the Bell/Amy/Mala singles on styrene I have encountered were actually pressed by Bestway Products in New Jersey. Which pressed easily the worst styrene records of all. The Columbia pressed Arista Flashback reissues often use original stampers and sound better than 99% of the original pressings I encounter.
 
All this talk about vinyl and record labels....off topic I know but I sure miss "Nipper" the RCA dog. What a great trademark!
 
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