Heavy Vinyl Production And the Unpredictability of Random Processes
Those in the business of producing the highest quality remastered recordings on LP are crashing smack into a problem endemic to the manufacturing of the vinyl record — randomness.
Record producers can control many of the processes (variables) that go into the making of a high quality record. But they cannot control all of them. The word for such a situation, one with random, uncontrollable aspects, is “stochastic.”
Taking the liberty to paraphrase Wikipedia liberally, we would explain it this way.
A stochastic, or random, process, is the counterpart to a deterministic process. Instead of dealing with only one possible way the process might develop over time, in a stochastic or random process there is some indeterminacy described by probability distributions. This means that even if the initial condition or starting point is known, there are many possibilities the process might go to, but some paths may be more probable and others less so.
In other words, although some of the variables can be controlled, there will always be some element of randomness that makes the final result predictable within limits, but not predictable precisely.
A thought experiment related to the classic Drunkard’s Walk is illustrative here. Imagine a drunkard walking down the sidewalk. On his right is a wall, on his left a gutter. He can’t walk very well, being drunk, so there is a good chance he will bump into the wall. Bouncing off the wall he will probably not be stopped but instead be able to continue on his way. However, if he falls into the gutter he will very likely not be able to get back up and will end up stuck there.
We know very well how the wall works, and we know very well how the gutter works, but we simply cannot predict how far down the street the drunkard will get before he falls into the gutter because of the unpredictable nature of his path. The average distance can be determined experimentally easily enough. But each time he starts his walk there is really no telling how far he will get.
Record making is like that.
We can put new shoes on the drunkard so that he stumbles less. Likewise we can sweep the sidewalk of debris that might cause our drunkard to slip and fall.
What we can’t do is specify the path the drunkard will take, just as we can’t insure that those pesky vinyl molecules will align themselves in the grooves of the finished record the way we want them to.
Which means that a small portion of the pressings will contain something approaching 100% of the musical information originally inscribed on the acetate. Most will contain a smaller amount, and that group will be followed by a very small group that will contain a much smaller amount. These groups will all be distributed in the classic bell curve fashion.
Part two of this discussion of randomness can be found here.
Further Reading
