Recording Vinyl Issue

Hello everyone!

I was trying to make a mix CD and there are some tracks I'm dubbing from vinyl. This is my setup: Turntable RCA to Receiver's Phono input. My receiver has a record output from which allows me to connect to my stand-alone CD recorder via RCA.

I noticed some songs had their left channels drop out at random spots or get distorted during playback and it seem fine during recording (as I was listening along). I tried cleaning the record, checking my connections, but the drops on the left channel happen arbitrarily or sometimes starts off with it. I tried swapping styluses and to my surprise I still get the same result. I don't think this has anything to do with tracking distortion and such.

Can someone explain to me what's going on?

 

If you have a tape deck, try recording vinyl to tape to see if you get the same problems. If you have the same problems, you can narrow it down to the cable, or maybe the record-out on your receiver.
If the problems stop, then it has something to do with your CD recorder.

 

The distortion might be caused by the signal being to hot, drop outs could be caused by buffering issues within the recorder, Tascam makes some nice portable recorders, it might be something to explore