Cue Burn

It seems that vinyl records are making a comeback. I’m always amused when in a movie someone plays a record. You see the needle drop on the outside edge of a 33 1/3 RPM 12 inch vinyl disk. There is a very satisfying and sexy thump that bumps the speaker cones in the theater sound system, then after a moment of silence as the needle grooves over to the first notes of the song that fills the air with a rich mixture of sounds. It’s all too cool, too neat and not at all the way it was back in the day. Don’t get me wrong, I love the vinyl experience but with personal vinyl record plays on the high side of fifty thousand, I have never experienced the start of a record just like that.

True life is a bit grittier than that! And in radio back in the day when vinyl was the main source of music it is a lot grittier than that.

For the most part, the vinyl I experienced was mostly on 7” 45 RPM singles. Rarely did I track an album through from the beginning to end. I must confess that after the second or third song from the same artist or band, I was ready for a change. So when I tracked an album side from beginning to the end, it was usually a multi artist anthology album. The best of those albums were “programmed” by folks that knew how to mix music. You never heard a “train wreck”, two songs that just clashed with each other and that never should be played back to back. You would be surprised at how much effort was put in by the producers of an album to make the listening experience as good as possible.

As rich as the vinyl listening experience is, it should be noted that each time a record is played it is damaged just a little. This is because when the phonograph needle tracks through the groove on the record it chips a molecule or two of vinyl off the ridges and valleys of the groove. So after a number of plays a scratchy sound becomes noticeable. Records made of high quality plastic were more resistant to this wear and tear than those made from the cheaper stuff. As a result, radio stations would go through several copies of a record before the end of a song’s chart life. Especially if the song did well on the charts and stuck around for many weeks from up and comer to the time it fell out of the top 40 and into the oldies bin.

Closeup of cue burn courtesy of Stanton Turntables. For records played in radio stations, there was a special form of abuse; cueing! In order to facilitate the starting of a song at exactly the time the DJ wanted it to start the record had to be queued up. Once the record was placed on the turntable, and the needle of the tone arm placed on the silent part of the groove, the record was then spun until the first notes of the song could be heard in the cue system. Then the record would be spun backwards to a point on the groove just before that first sound. When it was time to start, the turntable was turned on and voila, just like magic, it was on the air.

A couple of things to note here; first the cue system was a separate amplifier that was connected to a speaker in the studio in the control room that only the DJ could hear. Selecting cue was normally done by rotating the potentiometer or volume control for that turntable down past the off position where there was a detent by which the DJ could feel that the record was playing to the studio only speaker. Second, the early turntables took a couple of revolutions to come up to speed. So in order not to hear the unpleasant sound that caused, the DJ would place his or her fingertips on the edge of the record while starting the turntable beneath it. So the record would slip on the turntable until the DJ released it. This was called “slip queuing.” Just to be sure that the needle had not jumped from the chosen spot, in the last seconds before the time the song was supposed to start, he would check the cue a couple of times by letting it spin to the start of the music and then reversing the record back to the silence of the groove just before that point.

All of this activity created a thing that only DJs of a certain age had to deal with; cue burn! Spinning a record backwards with the needle in the groove was hard on the vinyl. After just a couple of times being slip queued a scratchy sound would become apparent at the beginning of the record from a second or so before the first note and continuing into the first second or so of the song.

Two things happened as the record’s time on the chart expanded. The static-icy sound got louder and longer. Then would come the glorious day when the program director would replace the record with a new copy, and the DJs would carry on destroying that version too.

Now, records were supplied to the radio stations by salesmen for the record labels. Each week, we would receive a bunch of 45’s in the mail that contained the demos that the record companies that the record companies were promoting that week. Once a month or so, the record salesmen would come by the station to make a case for their songs that we had not played yet. Quite often their spiel would be that such and such a station over in the next market was giving his song a lot of airplay and we should too. We never took their word; we knew what our competition was playing and what the neighboring markets were playing.

In addition to coming by to “push” the songs that we were not playing the salesmen also brought fresh copies of the songs we were playing so we could get rid of our copies with “cue burn.” Even before I put the new copy on the turntable the first time, I knew it was new. You see, “cue burn” was visible as a fuzzy spot on the beginning of the record. Also, and this is the cool part. The replacement record was usually made of the more expensive vinyl instead of the cheaper styrene on which that the demos were pressed. So usually when a song made it to the top 10, it got a new disk. Good thing too, by then it was in heavy rotation, which got it more airplay than the other songs.

These days, my oldies shows on the radio are mostly free of “cue burn” because I am playing them off of digital audio files that were “ripped” from the master tapes from the old record companies. There are a special few songs for which I could not find copies made from the master tapes so they were made from some old vinyl disk complete with the pops, crackles and “cue burn” that made it all so real back in the days. Heck, when I play one of those songs, I can almost smell the vinyl in the air. I close my eyes and BOOM, I’m 20 again bouncing my groove thing in the air chair out at Doug Broome’s Drive In on WCOS. If I stay there long enough, I can smell the mustard and catsup on the napkins that the kids used to send me their requests. I’m in the zone now, Baby! Oh MY!