Ongoing History Daily: Facts about vinyl everyone should know (part 3)

A vinyl record features a continuous groove that begins on the outer edge and spirals in toward the label. How long is that groove? It depends on how much music is on the side of a record, but a general length is somewhere around 500 metres.

How wide is that groove? Anywhere from 40 to 80 microns, which can also be expressed as 4 one-hundredths to 8 one-hundredths of a millimetre. That’s about the width of a human hair.

There are a couple of oddball exceptions to this. For example, in 1973, Monty Python released an album called Matching Tie and Handkerchief. One side of the record secretly had two spiral grooves side by side. Depending on when you dropped the needle, it caught one groove or the other, resulting in completely different audio. Imagine trying to figure out why that side of your record was different when you went to play it.