Well, that was weird...(or, The Mystery Of The Vanishing Surface Noise)

About a couple of months ago I picked up an LP copy of the recent reissue of Neil Young's self titled solo debut on Reprise. Overall, I can't really complain...except that on my copy the last half of side two had a persistent and annoying surface noise issue. It was one of those continuous, pulsing, scratching sounds. Loud enough to be noticeable and obtrusive. It was bad enough that after my initial listen to the LP I was already considering buying another copy. (Because I picked up the record from a franchise store, I was reluctant to go back and argue about the issue with the twenty-something staff.)

Anyway, last night I threw the LP on the turntable just to reassess and confirm my impression of the surface noise problem because I was planning to go out and buy another copy. Well, lo and behold, side two sounded fine. A couple of brief, minor surface noise bits, and that was it. Huh? Well, I'm happy now that I don't feel the need to replace this copy, but how the heck did a bad copy turn into a good copy after one play?

My guess is that the first spin cleared out some sort of debis or microscopic imperfections in the grooves. I just really don't know because I've never experienced this kind of transformation.

Any other guesses? (And no, it wasn't psychosomatic.)

 

"gunge on one side of stylus produced exactly the same effect on my set up!

 

I tend to clean my stylus before each side of play with an Onzow, and the record always gets a good swiping with a carbon fiber brush. But in this case it was the first play of a brand new album. Typically, the noise I heard usually signals a bad pressing, but then it just went away.

 

From time to time my stylus will pick up something during playback. I can almost immediately tell, these days, and I lift up the tonearm, clean the stylus and it goes away. I'm wondering if that didn't happen, and your subsequent play featured both a clean stylus and LP surface the whole way through?