If you want to go down an audiophile rabbit hole, here's a good one

[bluebird]

The look ahead is 1.1sec for 33-1/3 and .8sec for 45rpm.

I now use an after market digital pitch computer to cut. The VMS66 I use  had an analog computer that sampled the sound 4 times a revolution to know how fast to move the cutter head horizontally across the lacquer. It is averaging and can cut the grooves a little closer if the music has less bass content or over all volume. This way you can fit more time on a side at louder volumes which is important when sides have more than 18 minutes of program. Depending on the style of music, in order to fit something like 24 min of music on the side the volume may have to come down to the point of being a good deal in the surface noise of the record. I learned on the lathe using the stock analog computer and I would still get grooves crossing sometimes. I would have to turn down the music and do the side over.

In the 80's a company called ZUMA built a digital computer that bypassed the analog computer and could sample the program 16 times a revolution. You can pack a lot more on like that and get virtually no groove crossing. Two generations of Neumann lathes later (later than my VMS66), I believe the Neuman VMS80, had a digital computer built in.

 

[pucho812]

Ron is a good mastering engineer and nice guy to boot... right on.

 

[AusTex64]

I worked at Future Disc in the 80's. We had a Neumann lathe with Zuma computer.  We only used lookahead ATR's. I stopped cutting laquer in about 1988, and at that time I never saw anything but lookahead ATR's. At that time, the quality of digital delays were not good.

A sort of related story about audio quality - many of the Steely Dan records were worshipped for their audio quality. I was told they were fond of using digital delays on nearly every channel to slip stuff around in time before DAW's.