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One knob: where the needle is sitting on the side. Groove speed under the stylus falls as the arm walks inward, and nearly every audible record artifact is a function of that one number. Turning in does not fade four effects up together. It moves the needle.
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Hit BYPASS at any point and the untouched signal takes over without losing the playhead. Every demo is one take bounced twice at matched loudness, so what you hear change is the record, never the volume.
Almost every audible record artifact follows from a single number: the speed of the groove under the stylus, which falls steadily as the arm walks inward. On an LP it is about 51 cm/s at the lead-in and 21 cm/s at the run-out.
Tracing distortion, surface noise, wobble and bandwidth are not four effects to balance. They are four consequences of one position. So the side of a record is the knob, and you find the spot by ear.
The knob is a condition axis as well as a position. A sealed copy at the lead-in becomes a crate record by the run-out, and that ramp is smooth, weighted toward the upper half and full at the top, with no point where anything switches on.
The untouched signal is not on this knob at all. The lead-in is a well-aligned deck with a well-centered pressing, not a bypass. The power button in the top bar is the honest A/B, and that is what you should use for one.
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One knob, three switches, one gesture. Knob moves are smoothed and the switches crossfade, so everything here is safe to move while audio is playing. It is built to be performed, not only dialed in and left.
Fully counter-clockwise is the lead-in at the outer edge; fully clockwise is the run-out at the label. Everything follows from it, because groove speed under the tip falls as the arm walks in. The default is 30 percent — six minutes into an LP side, within a millimeter of the outer null of the arm’s alignment, and the quietest point on the side for tracking-error distortion.
Not the tilt of an EQ. LP is a 12-inch at 33⅓, a 20:15 side with the widest range under the knob: full bandwidth at the edge, real inner-groove trouble at the end. 45 is a 7-inch, a 4:00 side — a faster groove is cleaner per inch, but the side is short, so the whole arc is compressed. 78 is a 10-inch shellac: a 200 Hz to 3 kHz band, mono below 500 Hz, a much louder and busier surface, and a per-record speed error of up to ±6 percent.
The record does not change; the needle does. HIFI is an elliptical tip, flattest and cleanest out to 22 kHz, so the side position is the whole effect. DJ, the default, is a conical: about 2.25 times the tracing distortion, a presence lift near 7 kHz, and a top end that stops around 17 kHz — the sampled-off-a-record sound. WORN is the DJ tip a few hundred hours in, with a flat that holds the signal briefly at every zero crossing, so its rasp is level-independent and stays audible in quiet passages.
A surface bed, dust ticks that arrive in clusters, one scratch pop per revolution landing exactly on time — 1.8 seconds on an LP — and bearing rumble, all injected at the groove so the cartridge reads them like the music. The bed, ticks and pop rise as the arm moves inward; the rumble does not care where the arm is. Off is genuinely off, but it only removes the surface: bandwidth, tracing distortion, warp and the groove echo are the record itself and are always on.
Engage it and pitch falls, the wobble slows with the deck, tracing distortion climbs and the top end collapses as groove speed dies, while the surface noise fades out with the motion. Then the record rests, and the noise rests with it. From 33⅓ that takes 0.700 seconds; from 78, 1.638 — one inertia sets all three timings. Release it and the deck spins back up, with fresh audio sliding into pitch rather than a replay of the stall. Latching and automatable, so the gesture can be sequenced.
The cutting stage rearranges the low end before anything is pressed, the surface lives in the groove ahead of the needle so the cartridge reads dust the way it reads music, and everything rests when the platter does — noise is a tip tracing motion.
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