All About the Bass
Vinyl can reproduce incredibly deep, powerful bass. However, in this case there can be too much of a good thing. Extremely low frequencies (anything below 40 Hz) can force a turntable’s needle to swing so far to the side that it runs into a neighboring groove. This issue can be tackled by making sure the low end of your mix is controlled and tight. If your mix is shaking the doors of your car, it’s not going to play well with vinyl. Finally, make sure bass heavy sound sources are centered in your mix.
In addition to very low frequencies, there are two other things to consider for your vinyl record: stereo and out-of-phase information. Stereo bass content requires a great deal of vertical movement in the stylus, as the groove rapidly changes in depth. This radical groove geometry can easily cause skips. To solve this issue, you should center all low-end frequencies below 100 Hz and refrain from hard-panning bass information.
Out-of-phase material creates a different kind of problem: cancellation of frequencies that the cutting head can’t inscribe into the master lacquer. You may think that you’re bulking up your sound when you knock your kick drums out of alignment by a few milliseconds. In reality this out-of-phase material, especially on the low end, pulls the cutting head in two directions at once, collapsing the cut. You lose your groove and create a skip. To avoid this issue entirely, keep everything under 300 Hz in phase.
