so, i did finally get through almost the whole record, but it was punctuated by about a dozen stops to adjust the foil. the cause and effect was overwhelming - it shorted out whenever the cage broke and it was solid for long periods whenever the cage was in tact.

the way i understand this is that that more or less clarifies that the issue is in fact an external field, and not bad wiring. any remaining doubts on this point are now gone.

what it is that i'm going to do about it is a lot less clear.

the a/c is running upstairs at full blast. i may have grounds for a noise complaint to get it turned off. but i don't have strong evidence that there's any real relationship between the two things and am not going to go down that path until i do. the noise itself doesn't actually bother me...

i have some shopping to do early in the morning, and i'm going to want to listen to the last third of the record before i go on, but i have every reason to expect to move on to inri001 at some point tomorrow.