PO-80 Record Factory | Hacker News Reader

PO-80 Record Factory

teenage.engineering

245 pointsbpierre93 comments

This appears to be a rebranding (at nearly three times the price) of the Gakken Record Maker (which is still available online for its MSRP of ¥7,980 ($55) [1]). It even comes with a copy of the Gakken magazine! Here's a review of the Gakken record maker (which looks identical to the Teenage Engineering one) [2], the Japanese description from Gakken [3], and an English description from a reseller [4].

Gakken is a Japanese educational company. One of their products is a magazine called "Otona no Kagaku" (Adult Science) which comes with a kit to build a toy version of a mechanical or electronic device. Because they're part of a magazine, the kits are only available for a limited time. Here's some examples of the other issues' kits [5]. Some of the more notable ones are a wax cylinder recorder [6] and a gramophone kit [7].

[1] https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/NEOBK-2453544 https://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/4057507221/gkp_shu... https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB8qtW19nf4

[3] https://otonanokagaku.net/magazine/vol46/index.html

[4] https://www.turntablelab.com/products/gakken-easy-record-mak...

[5] https://otonanokagaku.net/ https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/series/2993 https://www.adafruit.com/category/269

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9X2CS4cs8o

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDdZFFLnsUo

> They've also made a wax cylinder recorder

Jan Derogee will be ecstatic to hear that in case he loses his reproducer again.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNFQkcbY5cQ

The margins on everything Teenage Engineering sells must be insane. Thinking in particular of their "computer-1" itx case which is a handful of pieces of unbent sheet metal and commodity parts, all for a mere *$195*.

Yeah, seems like it would be rather straightforward to send a template design to an online fabrication company. CNC seems like it would be overkill but I assume they are willing to cut sheet metal.

That could be a fun assignment for a design course. Lots of technical details to consider, such as dimensions of standard components, but a lot of design freedom as well.

A CNC laser would be the best bet. A good one could cut this in about 5 min. Water jets and CNC plasma cutters could do it, but they would probably both have issues with that many pierces.

I agree though - $195 for this is a bit much:

https://images.prismic.io/teenageengineering/d379b4fd-3721-4...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGpKAIsUIpI

It looks like it has countersunk screw holes, so that would usually be done on a CNC punch: http://www.vandf.co.uk/tooling/what-is-cnc-punching/ (amazing machines) It also looks powder-coated... when you consider their likely volumes $195 is not unreasonable once you take into account development costs, setup costs and overheads.

Not discounting the coolness of CNC punching whatsoever, but the reasonableness of $195 is way off, even if they are manufacturing in low volumes domestically.

Parts like this should ideally be manufactured via stamping, which would also produce any countersinks needed. Even better would be to have them cut and bent in a progressive die (also a super cool manufacturing process!) and would have all cuts and features done in one go. But if I were them, I'd probably aim for a buck or two for each sheet part, maybe up to five dollars if you wanted to keep it at a local shop with low volumes. But the big win of having just flat pieces is you can make a ton of components at once and they can take up very little space on a shelf. Get a few thousand produced and powdercoated, and then just keep an eye on when supply runs low.

Basically, if they aren't making 90% margin on these (all in, shipped to your door) I'd be disappointed.

Totally agree, they're getting these for a few bucks a part,maybe 10 bucks total for the kit. If they're paying any more they should not be.

The photo of the record factory on that landing page weighs in at 9.84MB -- the margin probably goes towards AWS bandwidth costs!

Which in turn, the margin AWS has on the bandwidth they sell must be insane! People seem to pay for "premium" bandwidth and not even batting an eye, people just swallow that stuff right up. Just like TE, it must make them a ton of money.

For comparison:

War and Peace is only 3.2 MB, or 3.9 MB with the overhead of HTML

source: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600

Yeah but the manga version is 6.6GB

Okay, now I'm curious, link to the manga version?

This manga is part of the variety art works series which transcribes (transdraws?) important literary works for younger japanese who might not have the understanding yet to read them in their orig. translation.

You can find a list of series here: https://myanimelist.net/people/21441/Variety_Art_Works

Edit: This is the same series that includes mein kampf and capital, both which have had many panels screenshotted you can find around the net circulating (f.e. if you'we ever met a mangaised Marx, or some weird collection of nazi's illustrated they are quite common tropes)

I just made that up for the joke

How does a professional web designer even put up a picture that large without going through some basic compression?

I've personally experienced this at work before.

A non-technical person uploaded the image to the CMS, assuming it will be scaled down at some point after uploading. A web developer used the image from the CMS, assuming it was scaled down at some point before being exposed for the frontend to access it. In reality the image never got scaled down anywhere, and ended up on the frontend in its full 9 MB glory. This ended up happening with several images.

I (not a frontend dev) ended up finding it because I was writing a strongly-worded message to my team lead about the huge pile of unnecessary tracking/surveillance scripts being forced on frontend users, and I wanted to make the point that it was making the frontend slow and heavy. It turned out out that the tracking scripts were nothing compared to the huge images!

Apparently nobody else bothered to check this before me, and/or didn't stop for half a second to think about it when they saw "Total page size: 13 MB" in their browser devtools, and/or didn't actually attempt to do any investigation when they saw our shitty Lighthouse rating. The world is full of professionals in name and status, but not in attitude.

I am a one man shop running a news site and put my site through webpagetest every Monday morning. I find it crazy that big companies apparently don’t do this.

You're likely more dedicated than most. There is a certain level of ignorance that allows these people to continue in comfort and unfortunately its not fixable because they don't know and likely don't care.

I am generally surprised when a web developer produces anything at all without 200 separate requests on every pageload and a 20M+ footprint.

The power of decent product with massive hipster appeal

I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like 400%+ on everything but maybe the pocket operators. Even those probably have healthy margin, as it is just PCB + some buttons. custom LCDs in tens of thousands are also insanely cheap (in ballpark of $1 for something like that).

> Yuri Suzuki has joined forces with cult electronics studio Teenage Engineering and Japanese educational toymaker Gakken to launch the PO-80 Record Factory.

https://www.pentagram.com/news/po-80-record-factory

Also, from the submission URL, second paragraph:

> PO-80 record factory is a compact and portable record cutter, made in collaboration with yuri suzuki.

If you're interested in how records are cut, Amanda Ghassaei had a really cool project 3D printing records that goes into detail. She later used laser cutting

https://amandaghassaei.com/projects/3D_printed_record/

https://amandaghassaei.com/projects/laser_cut_record/

The most surprising thing about this is how low the price is for a teenage engineering product. I don't know anything about LP manufacturing but 150 for an LP reader / writer seems pretty cool.

I can never get a handle on their pricing. Its all either absurdly low (how do they make pocket operators so cheap?!?!?), or absurdly high (why is OP-1 so absurdly high?!).

But at this price, hitting buy asap. It will be a neat effect for use in my studio.

this pricing is still quite high, it’s just a lower priced category. it’s priced at twice the japanese market version.

Closer to 3x, if we're not including stuff like shipping. The Japanese version is $55, TE's is $150.

Are the pocket operators really that cheap for the functionality they provide?

I was always of the opinion that Teenage Engineering was ridiculously overpriced, but so much of what they make is so cool that it makes me want to buy anyway. I'm not creative/musical/rich enough to justify buying an OP-1. If I ever was, though...

The pocket operators are great value, the PO-20 is one of the best all-in-one groove boxes around and the price makes it a total bargin.

However, the cases are pure ripoff territory. I wonder if there are 3rd party ones available.

$29 for a case is a very standard price for phones, and the PO cases have more functionality.

The pocket operators are, on the whole, amazing. Rhythm, Tonic, and Arcade are my faves. The pack a shocking amount of flexibility into a tiny package, and really aren't overpriced at all.

> I'm not creative/musical/rich enough to justify buying an OP-1. If I ever was, though...

Digitone/Digitakt/Syntakt are much better at high but still lower than OP-1 price while still being very playable

On the entirely other side, Korg Volcas are pretty cheap and fun little devices, few other companies also make similarly priced and sized ones.

And lastly, cheap midi keyboard and just software synths are cheapest option, if less "touchable".

OP-1 niche is basically people wanting to be limited on purpose and/or just having something super-portable to jam on

Dirtywave M8 is also kinda in similar space of "small & portable" but it's based off the old school trackers so super-powerful. But again, pretty pricy, and tracker workflow.

I think the Korg Minilogue xd is the best synth for the price. I also have several pocket operators, an Elektron Model:Samples (eh), and I’m borrowing my friend’s Volca Modular (which is pretty sweet).

If you need/want something all in one with keyboard yeah that's a decent choice. Throw some drums (I got TR-6S) and it's all you need really. They also have wavestate and opsix in similar price range. Funnily enough those two are powered by raspberry Pi CM

Microfreak is kinda cool and almost half the price of that but it's keyboard is both advantage and disadvantage.

Yamaha's reface series is also kinda interesting.

I wish some company would just release a midi keyboard with some knobs, buttons and screens and rpi socket, I feel like a lot of cool stuff could happen if all of the effort was focused on one hardware platform. There are a bunch of "a rpi doing music things" out there but mostly incompatible with eachother...

The custom LCD is ~1$ in bulk, PCB maybe $1-2, Microswitches can be had for like $1-2 usd per 100, probably another $2 in bits and bobs (passives, battery holder).

CPU is just a cortex M3 IIRC, probably some ADC/DAC, so maybe $5-7 for the "brain" of the thing ?

Then shipping, handling, rest of manufacturing (arguably very simple, no case, just board with components).

So there is probably still a healthy margin left, not anywhere near "absurdly low", just at that price the volume helps a lot.

> (why is OP-1 so absurdly high?!).

Coz they know people will buy it. They hold that price used too.

Don't forget that they need to make enough profit to recover their engineering NRE costs. At low volumes that can force pretty high prices.

It's 3x the price of the Japanese original that was linked in another thread. https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/NEOBK-2453544

As someone else has already reported, this is just a TE rebrand of an existing product with a 3x price increase for what I'd call the TE tax.

This doesn't make hifi audio.

It is surprising in the sense that I'm surprised TE didn't charge more but not in the sense that it should charge more.

The read/write thing got me on the train of thought of DVD-RW.

It uses 5 in discs so an LPRW would fit in a standard bay.

If it records at 33 and plays at 78 it's even a LPRW X 2.23!

I wonder how much data you could store...

Based on cassette data rates using audio encoding, and a total hand-wavey ballpark of ~10kB/min using modern encoding techniques, I'd totally guesstimate about 100kB of data on there.

Well that's more than enough for anyone!

My old TI-99/4a stored 90kb on a 5" floppy disk.

It's not an LP recorder, the disks are only five inch.

Good for scratching, not so much for listening. "Real" vinyl is going to be pressed.

The etching comes first on the master platter using a lacquer on an aluminum disc. Then that master is electroplated. Then that copy is electroplated (several times depending on production) too to make the pressing disk. Basically a mold of a mold to get the grooves.

> experience the warmth of lo-fi audio.

I wonder if what some people think of warmth of lo-fi is connected to the effect of white/pink/brown noises discussed earlier today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32998960

It’s a combination of RIAA equalization, mastering suited to vinyl, some distortion, and some surface noise (mostly unobtrusive clicks and pops), according what my ears report me while listening to vinyl.

Do you find it "warm"?

Is it because you are used to it, feeding nostalgia?

Or could it have to do with noise (distortion, clicks and pops) being soothing to the brain?

No, I really find it "warm".

I'm listening to the same Hi-Fi system since I'm six. I have both vinyl and CD versions of some albums (I only buy vinyls of albums which I like a lot, and listen it with a coffee or tea), and they really sound different.

I don't think it's because it's feeding the nostalgia, because I can feel the same things regardless of the medium and system I listen to these albums/songs.

I don't think soothing the brain angle is valid either. I get the same enjoyment and relaxation from both mediums.

For me, CD brings the enjoyment of a well brewed coffee, but vinyl brings the same feeling when you (sometime accidentally) brew that elusive perfect coffee for you. It needs some time and intention to appreciate.

I'm an ex-orchestra player though, so my experience may not reflect the views of bigger audiophile crowd.

Audio quality is about what you'd expect from a lathe cut record. That being said, since it is so hard to get vinyl pressed these days I could see a small run of cut singles being something artists could sell as a novelty for die hard fans. Neat!

The big problem here is that due to how soft the material has to be to cut, the lifespan on these is going to be somewhere in the realm of 1-10 plays.

That's like an acetate "dubplate" that promoters used give to club DJs to get new music out (mostly replaced by digital files now of course). They were good for a small number of plays and used just to gauge the crowd reaction.

Right, because this is the same process.

When you make an actual record you cut an acetate of each side on a record cutting lathe, which this product is a toy miniature version of.

Each acetate looks like a one-sided vinyl record only bigger (it's got margin around the edge). You can take that to a club and play it, but normally you take the pair to a pressing plant. They make a metal mould of each one and use them to press the vinyl records.

When I was a teenager in 1979 my band made a single on our own indie label. We got to go to see the legendary cutting engineer Porky in London near Oxford Circus and watched him cut the pair of acetates. Like all his work he scratched "A Porky prime cut" into the run out area.

A normal master is cut in metal, not acetate.

That metal positive is then plated and turned into a negative, and then the stampers are made from the negative.

Having listened to the samples they provide, I'll argue that the lifespan is about 0 plays, they're basically DOA.

As someone with a 7” portable turntable used for scratching (Numark PT01) this thing looks awesome for making my own scratch records. The question of course is how deep the cuts are. If they’re super shallow then that won’t be as nice, but I also won’t be as worried about wearing out a record cuz I could just cut another one.

Price wise this seems alright to me, I imagine it's a bit cheaper than their usual things because it'll become a thing a decent number of people use to make things like rewards for Patreon supporters, zine bonuses, etc. Production costs of £2 plus postage per (potentially) personalised 5" seems pretty good to me for all involved.

A tangent but it's crazy how bad their LED matrix for IKEA is, I like the speakers and all on an ornamental level (especially with the 3D printer potential) and the matrix could be super neat (even with the lack of dimming options) but the patterns and sound responsiveness are so terrible it's a bit baffling they let it go out in the condition it went out with... I'd actively keep it away from the rest of the set so I didn't have to underwhelm people by showing how bad it is (until I get around to modding it, anyway)

I applied a colour film over my matrix light because it was so bright

Also see VinyGo, a stereo vinyl recorder: https://hackaday.io/project/181401-vinygo-a-stereo-vinyl-rec...

Aside from the fact that this is a rebrand effort and probably not TE's manufacturing, their mainline products have particularly high quality design.

I've been watching a lot of AvE[1] lately, and his BOLTR series features him breaking down hardware and talking about the manufacturing.

While Teenage Engineering wank is definitely not his category of analysis, it's probably not far off, considering he highlighted how spotty the Dyson product line is. I'd love to see him disassemble something like the OP-1.

Edit: Missing link reference.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChWv6Pn_zP0rI6lgGt3MyfA

Apparently, OP-1s use CNC'd solid block aluminum machining![2]

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mqO7pVBxRQ

What’s AvE? You left off the link. Sounds interesting, want to watch the Dyson teardown!

Sorry about that! Thanks for pointing it out. Viewer discretion: language.

[1]: DYSON ANIMAL BALLS | It blows! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPTzNJMd19A

It's a shame he doesn't do many BOLTRs anymore. His output slowly petered out during COVID.

I think he got enough patreon types that he basically moved all his effort over there. He bought a CNC machine for the channel and then focused on the people who gave him the money for it.

Yea, that CNC machine kind of killed the YouTube channel IMHO

A higher quality version of this could potentially revive dubplate culture

As a producer walking into a set with vinyl of music I've made and cut earlier in the day would be DOPE. Impressive AF

But it's so bad... It's so strictly in the "toy" category it's not even funny..

Somehow this fits well with teenageengineerings line of very overpriced products with a tremendously high focus on novelty and high markup and not much else.

"THIS PRODUCT IS NOT SUITABLE FOR YOUNG CHILDREN AS IT CONTAINS SHARP METAL AND OTHER SMALL PARTS." Yet they show a super young child on their page.

"give your favorite 7" records new life". No thanks, I like them as they are.

Listening to the distortion, it sounds like it could possibly be reduced/minimized by experimenting with pre-emphasis curves! I wonder if the existing community around this product's predecessor has worked on that...

"to get the optimum sound quality for your recordings, use our vinyl mastering tool to pre-process your audio before cutting. created for use with the PO-80 record factory, it applies the desired equalizer curve to your music and makes it easier to achieve good lo-fi sound quality on your custom 5" cuts."

As much as I think this is a bad way to record audio (or data), the idea of an audio recording media that can be played without electricity or electronics is appealing.

Something's broken with the design of the website, it looks zoomed in and zooming out doesn't even work.

That website is so bloated, if you're on roaming data, don't even bother.

Sweet :)

teenage engineering has some of my favorite technical documentation

Friendly reminder: you don't really want to do it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ

got my order in! this will be really fun to play around with

This is peak of audio hipsterism! Audio quality is crap. Better to record on cassette with some boombox.

Also see this DIY project - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7osjazhLE

In the age of AI fakes and perfect high fidelity available to anybody, the “crap” noise and distortion of this kind of thing is going to become a signal of reality that will be sought after.

Ya they just invented distortion no one does that in music right? It's not like they make pedals and plugins specifically for distortion. Instead you should pay TE for this revolutionary rebranding of an existing device.

It's nonsense sir.

It's really no more nonsense than lo-fi tracks having rain sounds in the background or hiphop producers running old school beats through a 12-bit sampler to crush it up a bit.

Producers use a ton of subtle tricks to make you unknowingly enjoy their work more with a touch of nostalgia.

My Roland sampler has a "simulate vinyl" effect that's trying to do the same as this product, but in software.

Yes as I said there are already many distortions and bit crushers in use by people making music today, this little overpriced record cutter isn't revolutionizing anything because of distortion.

It is bad audio quality - but I find it potentially an interesting effect. I could see myself using it in the studio; not for final master of course, but as an effect for a section of a song or instrument. Compared to a guitar pedal, the price is right.

As someone who has released music on cassettes recently, the unfortunate part is that few people seem to have cassette decks anymore but many people have low end turntables. I suspect even bad sounding records would sell better than cassettes or CDs.

All new cassette players are very low quality, and the old ones are slowly falling apart. Even though they're often not beyond repair, not a lot of people have the willingness to put in the effort.

Nobody that's buying this (including me) is buying it for its pure utility. They're buying it because it's cool-looking, fun, interesting, educational, or whatever. If my goal was good audio quality, of course it's not what I'd buy. I already own a high end flash recorder, multiple very capable computers, etc. (I also own two of Gakken's earlier wax cylinder gramophones and a few of their other kits.)

needs a mic

Listening to a vinyl emits much more CO2 than listening to a digital recording. I wish people would keep that in mind.

Can you put that in some perspective with just an order of magnitude? Somehow it feels like next to auto or plane travel, or consuming beef - audio playback of any kind would seem like it isn't very significant.

Hmm actually I wonder now if this was a joke and I just got suckered.

No, Benn Jordan got into that a while back. It's not the listening part, it's the manufacturing that isn't 'green', though I'm not sure quite how the math works: for instance, whether they're counting the trucking of boxes of vinyl circles all over the place rather than just uploading bits locally. Some of that would apply to CDs, too, but CDs are about as relevant as vinyl records are.

> it's the manufacturing that isn't 'green'

If this is really the case then it probably doesn't belong in this thread about a usb-powered (!!) "factory".

But the vinyl blanks for this device have to be manufactured, with similar processes to the vinyl for professional releases. Also, cleaning the disk after you cut it, hoovering up the swarf etc. is surely more energy efficient when done in bulk in a factory? Factories use more energy than a home device, but when divided by the number of units produced?

Also worth mentioning that vinyl records cannot be recycled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com