What caused the abrasions seen in the picture of the one of four abraded LPs in the Record Store Day Roy Orbison box set? Analogplanet asked the question and wondered whether it was industrial sabotage, sloppy handing or a shipping snafu. We now think we have an answer.

An astute reader suspected abrasion during shipping and he provided a scenario by which we could test the hypothesis: put some clean 180g LPs in the same packaging, then "shake and bake" as would happen during shipping. So that's what we did, using some "spare" 180s, the musical content of which will remain secret! Careful pre-examination revealed no abrasions.

After about five minutes of jostling the records were removed and examined and while the abrasions were not as grotesque as on the Orbison LPs, the formerly clean 180s all showed signs of abrasions running perpendicular to the grooves. The obvious conclusion is that rough shipping, not sloppy handling at RTI caused the abrasions.

Shipping is a serious problem as everyone reading this knows. 180g records are relatively heavy and when jostled they can damage even the highest quality jacket spines. Now there's evidence that multiple LPs packed tightly laterally in a heavy slipcase but with room to move "in and out" can produce serious vinyl abrasion. Would a different inner sleeve material make a difference? RTI has gone from rice paper to those pink plastic (?) inner sleeves that bind relatively tightly to the record but it's not certain that rice paper would make a difference in this kind of multi-LP box packing.

The bottom line is, this kind of box set requires packing that does not allow the records to slide to and fro within the box or abrading is possible. It's not guaranteed, because many readers have emailed to say theirs were fine.