GROOVE TUNING

   If time and experience has taught us anything, it is that our precious record grooves are far from perfect.

• Disc cutters are not perfect
• The molding process, though impressive, is not perfect
• The artifacts of groove wear are inconsistent from side to side
• The playback stylus and cartridge are not perfect

   The monophonic record groove begins life as a single groove, modulated laterally, or side to side. There are also vertically cut mono recordings where the groove modulation is cut in a hill and dale motion. These are less prevalent.

  When you play back a mono recording using a stereo cartridge and listen in stereo you can hear all these variables present themselves in the soundstage.
- Left signal and noise
- Right signal and noise
- Left + Right signal and noise
- Left – Right surface noise
- Right – Left surface noise
Usually the first step towards improving the sound is to simply combine the left and right channels with a mono selector or mono cartridge. This goes a long way in reducing surface noise by cancelling the Right - Left and Left - Right signals. But because the quantities are not perfectly equal, then neither are the cancellations.

We can use the attributes of the stereo cartridge to our advantage by first dissecting all these different signals. Then we can pit them against each other in a way that produces the most optimum cancellation of noise and distortion. And we call this process Groove Tuning™

The first product to embody this concept will be the KAB Souvenir GTX due late December 2002. The Processor will feature balanced line inputs and outputs. In addition there will be separate outputs for Left, Right, Lateral Mono and Vertical Mono. These last 4 outputs can be used to synthesize 4 channel soundstages from standard stereo sources.

Front panel controls will feature
Hardwire bypass
RIAA invert
Flat and 500 Hz EQ
Stereo Blend
Mono Lateral Mix
Mono Vertical Mix
Vertical Invert
Mono Vector Mix
Function Selector: Left, Right, Lateral, Vertical, Vector, Stereo, Stereo Rev., Stereo Vertical, Stereo Vector.