Print-through occurs because professional audio tape is recorded with a much higher “reference fluxivity” than consumer audio tape. The magnetic fields of the recorded tape are much stronger, and layers of tape lying next to each other can and do impart faint copies of the recorded program from one layer to the next over time.
“Tails Out” (storing the tap in a played condition) will “prevent” tape print-through. “Prevent” in quotes because it still happens, but the effect is buried in the audio before the end of the tape. That is - the print-through will occur before the end of the program where it is masked by the program itself, instead of after the end of program which is silence and makes the print-through obvious.
Even tension is also a good reason to store tape “Tails Out.”
My cousin told me of an LP (the Who? the Kinks?) with a joke built into the run-out groove. He said it didn’t run in far enough to trip the standard automatic turntable. Instead, that last circle had four short notes recorded on it. After the album was over, you heard didit, didit,…didit, didit until you manually tripped the changer.
This is called pre-echo, and it has nothing to do with tape print-through (although if your master tape has print-through that could show up on the record too, which is why master tapes usually separate tracks with leader, which is magnetically null). Pre-echo exists as an artifact of the groove cutting process, as explained (not very satisfactorily I think) by a cartridge manufacturer here.
I heard about a company in Germany that’s trying to develop a method to use lasers to cut record stampers, no laquer cutting involved, which should eliminate this problem, but don’t get too excited just yet.
True, 45s, and some 10-inch, records have smaller labels: 3 1/2 inches versus 4. I don’t know much about trip mechanisms and how they work, but you can fool at least some of them into playing a locked groove by using the lift lever, lifting the arm off the record and tapping it in very tiny increments until it’s hovering over the inner groove, then moving it back and playing normally; it won’t trip (but once you return it to the cradle, it resets).
Well I don’t think any worked off angular velocity exactly, I think the idea is that when it was a mechanical system there, the mechanism relied on the angular velocity of the stylus arm to keep the mechanism moving truely into the “stylus up, go home” state. Basically its dodgy friction system …
The stylus arm has another arm below the turn table, to operate the return mechanism.
All that matters is that its an L shape lever, or equivalent, and if the arm doesn’t completely lift it up and over, to where the stylus arm is lifted (and driven out to home ? ) it falls back down to play mode. So the more momentum in the arm inward, the more chance it has to flip the L lever/trigger .
And its possible the mechanism didnt return completely to “play”, so the second attempt might then send it over the edge and lock it into the return/off stage. (off, at least to save the needle from wear.)