Bubbles In My Platter

Hi to all,

On cleaning my P8 Platter today, I noticed some air bubbles around the edge of the platter which I’m sure weren’t there when I purchased the P8. I’ve sent a picture of the platter to my dealer who has yet get back to me but I was wondering if anyone has had this problem with their P8 ?

Cheers :+1:

Has it got a protective plastic film on the glass?

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It does rather look like that. I don’t recall my Planar 8 coming with a plastic film however. Certainly, bubbles cannot appear in glass. If it did they’d the popping up in your windows and wine glasses.

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There is no protective film on the P8s platter.

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Thanks for your replies, I’ve looked closely and it looks like when the prices of glass were going through the bonding process air has been trapped in the ‘sandwich’.

You should ask a replacement. It’s not normal.

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Yes, when my dealer is bothered enough to get in touch I’ll ask for a replacement.

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I would be pretty confident that this phenomenon would, to all intents and purposes, be inaudible. I wonder if a forensic examination would reveal all sorts of inaudible ‘flaws’ in the materials in our equipment?

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Let’s see if Rega see it that way. If the ‘defect’ isn’t there on other P8’s then it should be exchanged even if, as you say, wouldn’t affect sound quality.

My P8 certainly never had any bubbles. Maybe it’s a West Ham special edition.

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With it being a 3 platter sandwich I’d expect its a bubble in the adhesive between two of the layers or whatever is used to bond them. Cant recall mine having any issues but I dont really care enough to look tbh

I probably wouldn’t be that bothered if it was just one or two air pockets, but they are visible all around the outer part of the platter so there is a small possibility that the whole platter could come apart at some point. When I set the P8 up I cleaned the platter with a soft dry cloth and didn’t notice any pockets of air but I wasn’t really looking for any so they must have been there from new.

I had many of them in my RP8 platter.

So did you have it replaced?

Nope. I got it as a replacement for my RP6 platter that cracked in the middle. I guess it was a replacement by someone else. I never cared since the mat covered it.

Reduced platter mass (and balance) must have affected the designed performance.

The RP8 platter on my RP6 was great :ok_hand:

I don’t think that a few air pockets trapped between bonded layers will make any measurable difference here. You will probably still have all the glass and bonding agent present with the weight of a minute amount of gas added. And even if the bonding agent is missing there it will be minute.

I am sure that vinyl discs themselves will have weight differences around the disc that will be orders of magnitude greater.

At the end of the day the weight of platter is there to conserve momentum to add an extra buffer to any variances the motor may experience from changes in the current etc. The weight difference would have to be big enough to induce a shimmy to affect performance, I would expect.

That said this is my expectations from some knowledge of chemistry and such. I am by no means an expert in turntable platter balancing.

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Given the slow speed of rotation it probably won’t make much difference.

My “engine building” head tends to want rotating components balanced. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Yeah I was thinking this as well. The slow rotation will add to compensate.

But the entire system must be built to deal with quite a bit of imperfection already. Sometimes I amazed what comes out of the speakers when I look at the production quality of some vinyl.