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

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

It's difficult capable to set up a turntable aliases prime the correct player, but fixing a warped grounds without specialized tooling (and nan associated knowledge to spell pinch 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 nan Flatten It, its first dedicated vinyl flattening machine. It’s a ruggedly handsome lump of aluminum, pinch 2 12-inch basking plates that power and property your precious agelong players backmost into shape. Can it prevention your worst records? In my experience, it does beautiful well.

Finally Flat

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

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