Pro-Ject Flatten It Review: Finally, a Way to Fix Warped Records

Collect capable vinyl and you’re guaranteed to find yourself with a mates of warped albums that won’t play properly. Maybe you foolishly near them successful nonstop sun, possibly you didn’t store them flat, oregon perchance you recovered a wobbly aged rarity astatine a bargain terms and figured you could reconstruct it and bushed Discogs astatine its ain game.

It's hard capable to acceptable up a turntable oregon prime the close player, but fixing a warped grounds without specialized tooling (and the associated cognition to spell with it) has agelong been excessively overmuch of a symptom to beryllium worthy it for most.

Turntable stalwarts Pro-Ject is aiming to hole that. It has conscionable launched preorders for the Flatten It, its archetypal dedicated vinyl flattening machine. It’s a ruggedly handsome lump of aluminum, with 2 12-inch blistery plates that vigor and property your precious agelong players backmost into shape. Can it prevention your worst records? In my experience, it does beauteous well.

Finally Flat

There's thing particularly fancy here, conscionable a highly close thermostat offering the perfect warmth to hole your shellacs. Once heated for astir an hour, it volition support a somesthesia of 136.4 grade Fahrenheit (58 Celsius) and mildly robust retired immoderate vinyl warping. It volition fluctuate conscionable 2 degrees from this, and erstwhile you’ve near for 2 hours, down to 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), the grounds tin beryllium safely removed.

How agelong you property a grounds for volition beryllium connected the thickness of the vinyl. Chunky 180 gram pressings volition instrumentality longer than the much flexible, and harder to warp, Dynaflex records. Before I enactment the Flatten It to enactment connected my cherished-but-wobbly postulation of warped ’90s achromatic labels, I needed to trial it connected thing a small little precious.