Timecode L and R values

Jay McQueen

Of all the things on the internet, you'd think I'd be able to find an answer to this, but so far I have not….

When using timecode vinyl and in the TIMECODE SETUP submenu of Traktor Pro 3 — what do the L and R values represent and how is it measured? And what numbers are ideal and not ideal? I notice that when the vinyl is on, the numbers are roughly in the 30s. When I take the needle off the record, it goes up into the 60s or even 70.

Thanks!

Owner

Basically, a few things that I was able to take from your postings:

You play on a different setup at home than at this house party, right? Please describe your complete setup at home and then at the house party.

So, which turntables, needles, sound cards, mixers, etc. you use?

Recognizing sources of error in a DVS setup takes a bit of practice and coolness, as you have to be able to do cross-comparisons while you're playing in order to locate the source of the error.

Let's start by looking at the chain of where the problem could be.

Internal:

1. You may be using a different interface at this house party than usual and therefore have different values ​​for latency and sampling rate. A latency that is too low or a sampling rate that is too high could be a cause of your problem.
2. Your scopes on your screenshots looking good so far, including the grounding.
3. The values ​​for L and R are very high, but that could be due to various things. As I checked yesterday on my Rane Tewelves MKII, the value of these numbers increases if you reduce the volume of the Timocode a little. Therefore, the inputs on your mixer or sound card could also be relatively weak.
4. From experience, I have had only a few problems in Traktor if the signal was too hot / e.g.the phono preamp was too "loud", etc... The prime example for me was the DJM-750 from Pioneer, where the signal was too hot and then repeatedly caused calibration problems or playhead skipping.

External:

1. Clean needles and clean pins on the connections. Oxidation on the pins or dirt on the needles can cause problems.
2. Oxidation on the pins in the tonearm. Fogged up pins on the tonearm connection can cause problems and are usually the biggest weak point nowadays.
3. Bent tonearm, or incorrectly set height or anti-skating, can quickly cause certain inconveniences when playing with timecode.
4. The tracking weight of your needles. Especially when there is a lot of bass in a room and strong feedback, if the tonearm is incorrectly set or the turntable is not on a decoupled and leveled surface, can cause problems.
5. cinch cables have loose contacts, broken solder joints or are worn out.
6. grounding, see above for cinch.

as you can see, the causes can be different. If you play in a room with strong bass vibrations this can even make the problems worse.

Since you don't have any problems at home, I'm assuming it's one of these. If you can, check the setup for this house party again in the next few days, without the stress of standing in front of people and having to entertain them.

pARty_bOy

the L/R are to visually check the RCA connection, or stylus/headshell pins, you also have the meter and the scope to check the signal, diferent styluses have diferent output volumes, has long has you have a "circle" on the scope TC is calibrated

https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000509157-TRAKTOR-PRO-3-Timecode-Setup-Guide

Owner

What party boy says is actually correct. But your value seems a bit strange to me. Despite the high output of my Qbert needles (11mv), mine is about 15L and 16R. If I take the needle off the record or stop the deck, I get about 31L and 32R. But I'm not quite sure whether a less high needle output should generate a smaller or larger value. I haven't looked into it for a long time.

As long as you don't have any problems in Traktor when you play with timecode, it shouldn't really matter. But that's not entirely clear to me from your posting. Is everything working as expected for you? Otherwise, take a screenshot of your scope and post it here if you want.

Jay McQueen

Hey guys, thanks so much for responding…

So, Owner, you're right, my asking for information about these numbers is largely due to my desire to get as much information as I can about this in light of a problem that I've had with Traktor. The crazy thing is — I have not been able to reproduce this problem at home or anywhere else. It's only happened while playing this one specific house party and it happened 2 years in a row!

Basically what happens is, midway through the night, the audio on only one of the turntables (with Traktor) gets garbled and sounds like it's under water. I get the red flashing lights as if it's not tracking/calibrating. Tried checking for dust on the stylus, recalibrating, etc….nothing works. I did manage to get the problem to switch to the other deck when I swapped carts/stylus' to the other deck. It made me think the issue was one of the stylus'. The variables that are at this specific house party that were consistent both years and generally not present at my other gigs are quite a bit of bass in a fairly small room and a haze machine. Last year I wanted to blame the haze machine but it didn't make sense to me that I only had the issue on one of the decks. This year, again, it happened to only one of the decks and when I managed to get the problem to follow the cart/stylus, I figured maybe it was the stylus that was on its way out. When I got home the next day and set the decks up at home (without smoke and a big sub), I of course had no problems at all.

This brings us full circle to why I'm asking about the L and R values in the timecode setup menu. I ordered and tested out a replacement stylus (Ortofon Club MKII) and from what I can see, the values I get with the new one are very similar to the values of my 2 original stylus'.

To PartyBoy's point about the L and R values and the RCA cables — I tried to loosen the cables a bit and recalibrated to see if I'd get a different value and I did not. And then once I unplugged one of them, it gave me the warning signal that a channel was missing and gave no value at all.

Owner, it's really interesting to me that your values with the needle OFF the records is basically what mine are with it ON the records!

Anyway, there are my scopes, with the needles on the records, then off. The timecode records are about a year old and I honestly only play about once a month.

My end goal is to find out what caused this issue ONLY at this one guy's house party so that I can ensure it doesn't happen there or anywhere else again. Because it SUCKS in a live situation when every other track sounds like it's half under water!

pARty_bOy

Also check the headshell small wires, if you touch them and hear hummm, they might be bad or not well connected, but I had similar stuff like yours happen on right deck, and a traktor restart solves the issue. But I only have weird TC stuff in windows, never had issues on macOS.

Owner

Basically, a few things that I was able to take from your postings:

You play on a different setup at home than at this house party, right? Please describe your complete setup at home and then at the house party.

So, which turntables, needles, sound cards, mixers, etc. you use?

Recognizing sources of error in a DVS setup takes a bit of practice and coolness, as you have to be able to do cross-comparisons while you're playing in order to locate the source of the error.

Let's start by looking at the chain of where the problem could be.

Internal:

1. You may be using a different interface at this house party than usual and therefore have different values ​​for latency and sampling rate. A latency that is too low or a sampling rate that is too high could be a cause of your problem.
2. Your scopes on your screenshots looking good so far, including the grounding.
3. The values ​​for L and R are very high, but that could be due to various things. As I checked yesterday on my Rane Tewelves MKII, the value of these numbers increases if you reduce the volume of the Timocode a little. Therefore, the inputs on your mixer or sound card could also be relatively weak.
4. From experience, I have had only a few problems in Traktor if the signal was too hot / e.g.the phono preamp was too "loud", etc... The prime example for me was the DJM-750 from Pioneer, where the signal was too hot and then repeatedly caused calibration problems or playhead skipping.

External:

1. Clean needles and clean pins on the connections. Oxidation on the pins or dirt on the needles can cause problems.
2. Oxidation on the pins in the tonearm. Fogged up pins on the tonearm connection can cause problems and are usually the biggest weak point nowadays.
3. Bent tonearm, or incorrectly set height or anti-skating, can quickly cause certain inconveniences when playing with timecode.
4. The tracking weight of your needles. Especially when there is a lot of bass in a room and strong feedback, if the tonearm is incorrectly set or the turntable is not on a decoupled and leveled surface, can cause problems.
5. cinch cables have loose contacts, broken solder joints or are worn out.
6. grounding, see above for cinch.

as you can see, the causes can be different. If you play in a room with strong bass vibrations this can even make the problems worse.

Since you don't have any problems at home, I'm assuming it's one of these. If you can, check the setup for this house party again in the next few days, without the stress of standing in front of people and having to entertain them.

Jay McQueen

Thanks again guys for responding…

PartyBoy — my Ortofon Concorde headshells have all the wires tucked inside of them and none visible so I can't touch them to see if it hums.

Owner — My setup is 2 Technics 1200 M3Ds with Ortofon Concorde Club MKII's, connected to the Traktor Kontrol Z2 and then into a Samsung laptop from 2012. In the Traktor Pro 3 audio device selection section, I choose TRAKTOR KONTROL Z2 (ASIO). The laptop itself apparently has a Realtek soundcard and/or an AMD one but I don't believe I'm using it given that I've selected that ASIO one I mentioned. This is ALWAYS my setup, whether at home or out playing a gig. The wild card I spoke of was that I don't have that haze/smoke machine at home, nor do I have the powerful subwoofer that I rented for my buddy's party. Those are really the only 2 things that are different about the entire setup.

I'm usually very good about cross checking things to determine the source of any problems but as you can probably appreciate, when it happens in a live setting, it's tough. I regret not taking pics of the traktor software during the issue but I was too busy trying to keep the ship from sinking. lol (ie hitting the rel/intl button so that it would simply play the mp3 and not play garbled/digitized audio via the timecode.)

RE your "internal" points — the latency and sampling rates didn't deviate at all from the usual ones as it's the same audio equipment setup at both places. I'm really curious about the high L and R values and still can't get over the fact that I can't seem to find anything from NI about what they mean and what is ideal, etc? But it sounds like you've managed to determine a quieter signal = higher numbers and so yeah, I'm wondering why my numbers are what they are. And furthermore, if they're TOO low? I'm not sure there's a way to boost the soundcard output? I do know that when I play regular vinyl, I need to turn the gain up much more than when playing timecode. I think that's normal though, but might also illustrate that maybe it isn't a soundcard volume issue?

As for the "external" points — totally understand the cleaning the needles and records point. There may have been an increase in debris on the needles that night due to the haze machine but I was cleaning as I went…

The pins on the headshells and tonearms are immaculately clean. A friend of mine is a turntable enthusiast and did a really nice job cleaning these before I bought them off him. Turntables were leveled and tonearm was as well. Turntables are inside flight cases. Tonearms are in good shape and antiskating is at 1.5. The height of the tonearm is actually something I'm not sure I've researched where it should be. I do believe both decks though have it set as low as it goes. Tracking weight is 3g which is what Ortofon recommends for my cartridges. I'm actually not sure what you mean by cinch cables.

Unfortunately, I can't go back to the guy's house anytime soon to recreate the issue. However, I did have an issue tonight where one of the decks absolutely refused to calibrate. I swapped stylus', nothing worked. Once I restarted Traktor, it was fine. I didn't have the garbled audio and any of that with the issue, it just didn't want to calibrate. I guess that's the thing with software sometimes….it just decides upon startup the odd time that it's not going to work the way it's supposed to! lol.