Vinyl carver sparking a craze for cutting records at home
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's not easy! It's not like plugging in a printer. There are so many variables to consider (materials, temperatures, pressures, angles, sharpnesses, volumes, phase), magical anti-static solution formulas, airflow, isolation, line control. The margin of error can be as low as 100 microns, and if you screw up, you might break a $200 diamond shank which have to be specially manufactured and imported.
And that's before you even get to the actual audio quality!
Still, it's fun to use and great to have 1-of-a-kind dubplates.
Either way, the physical media in your imagined setup, and what you are playing, have no special relationship.
No need to use it like a bad transmission wire. If it can’t transmit across time (storage) it is not a real “reel” anyway.
On the other hand, apart from the trivial detail of us all living in our own unique problem situations, I'm pretty sure that my preferences are the best and anybody else would be revealed to have stupid ones, if only we could communicate about them. But (speaking of bad transmission wires) detailed communication about ineffable private experiences is patchy at best, so regrettably we have to leave one another in peace to enjoy stuff, and lay off on the backseat driving.
I've just recorded an album and had it's being mastered this week. We're paying £60/track for mastering, and an extra £10/track for vinyl mastering.,
I’m currently into making CDs.
Unfortunately all the cassette mechanisms (and cassettes themselves) manufactured and sold new today are complete garbage. And the old ones need a lot of (physical) maintenance to get back into spec.
Digital Show & Tell from Monty at Xiph
> Those of you who have used analog recording equipment may have just thought to yourselves, "My goodness! That sounds like tape hiss!" Well, it doesn't just sound like tape hiss, it acts like it, too. And if we use a Gaussian dither, then it's mathematically equivalent in every way. It _is_ tape hiss!
> Intuitively, that means we can measure tape hiss, and thus the noise floor of magnetic audio tape, in bits, instead of decibels, in order to put things in a digital perspective. Compact cassettes... (Monty holds up a tape, then glares at it and flips it over in his hand) ... for those of you who are old enough to remember them, could reach as deep as nine bits in perfect conditions, though five to six bits was more typical, especially if it was a recording made on a tape deck.
> That's right - Your mixtapes were only about six bits deep, if you were lucky. The very best professional open-reel tape used in studios could barely hit - any guesses? - 13 bits _with_ advanced noise reduction.
Hiss is variable, too. When calculating the low end of the range from the background hiss, do we consider a -80dB hiss above ~2000Hz affecting the "bit depth" more than -80dB hiss below it? The hiss is nowhere near white noise either, so some frequency ranges are more affected than others.
Now, whether the store-bought tape from the 90s was recorded well, that’s a different story.
https://audiochrome.blogspot.com/2020/12/cassette-tape-measu...
I find some charm in the lo-fi sound, if I wanted hi-fi sound I would just record something digitally for basically free, so I don't see the point of chasing the dragon of ultimate cassette sound quality.
All in all great fun though!
Normally "masters" are lacquers, though, so a company that makes their own "masters" still probably outsources the steps after the lacquer and before stamping finished records.
> With the destruction of Apollo Masters, producing lacquer discs fell solely to a small Japanese company, MDC. This caused a significant strain on the industry, as Apollo Masters was responsible for 70-85% of lacquer production.[4][5] As a result of the strain, orders became backlogged and delayed, (...)
> With a decrease in lacquer production, some vinyl pressing plants turned to alternate means of producing records, including direct metal mastering, a costly method of producing records with copper instead of lacquer.
We called these records "dubplates" since this practice came from West Indian soundystem culture. I'm sure there are still DJs that do this today.
We are also running a soundsystem and mainly cutting for other DJs.
Records are cool!
edit:
ok I googled it: 3d printed playable record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM7hwAuXqCE
1. yes it's possible - using some kind of resin printing method, not FDM.
2. no it doesn't sound very good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ&pp=ygURYmVubiBqb...
"Vinyl: Maybe it's time we had an intervention" by Benn Jordan.
tl;dw: He puts a VOC meter to a vinyl record and yep they're definitely toxic. Remember, if you smell something, it's going inside your body. That includes "new plastic smell", farts, etc.
> This is just my objective opinion based on a whole lotta research... if you're an avid vinyl collector whose pee-pee hurts after watching this video, understand that my pee-pee hurts a whole lot more.
It's a small shop (and another guy who does the "metal plates") with guys from a punk/hardcore background who are running a basement vinyl production. The video includes a nice simulation of cutting the grooves.
Lead concentrations in offshore waters are ranging from 0.0035 (American Samoa, South Pacific Ocean) to 0.150 pg/L. (Western Mediterranean Sea; Copin-Montegut et al. 1986).
A lead-acid car battery typically contains 16-21 pounds of lead
For comparison: average concentration of 20 mg/kg of soilI thought the whole point of vinyl was that it maintains analog from recording to playback
FWIW, almost all vinyl records produced today will come from a digital source. Even if the music was recorded directly to tape, there’s very likely a step of getting that audio into the digital domain.
Also, for what it’s worth you can find online audio tests (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...) that let you test if you can hear the difference between CD quality audio vs high bit rate mp3. Basically nobody can determine the difference with accuracy.
That may be one point for some people, but not mine. I have my music on vinyl and that is how I listen to it. Regardless of the quality or analog vs digital or any of that, if I want to own an album, it needs to be available on vinyl for my to purchase. There are albums I want that I cannot purchase today. This is _my_ walled garden.
You still see cassettes used today because of the ease of home distribution, and bridging the gap between those indie music makers and music consumers like myself is something I am looking forward to.
That can't be the reason, USB sticks are much easier to get/make/distribute
They usually include the digital download as well so maybe it is just a fun way to get the digital music?
All things that MiniDisc took inspiration from. It added metadata, near-infinite rerecordability, and on-the-fly track division, combination, and rearrangement.
Never took off in the US, more popular in Europe, very popular in Japan. They were expensive and the first device’s encoding chip gave poor results on a battery that could barely record an hour.
- I prefer to own vs rent music
- I prefer physical to digital (albums often come with digital downloads)
- I enjoy listening to full albums
- I enjoy the album art, liner notes, posters, special releases, etc
If I’m reading this right, he owns vinyl music recordings for the purpose of playing back music.
When I was a teenager I recorded vinyl, cassette, cd and even music from the radio on reel to reel tapes just because I liked using the Akai reel to reel tape deck my father was no longer using. Everything in it felt just more satisfyingly sturdy and mechanical to use than my other audio devices made with shitty plastics.
Sometimes the ritual matters more than the outright audio quality.
A few years ago, I realized that the use case for CDs no longer held. Vinyl will persist for experience seekers, lossy audio (MP3 et al) for convenience seekers including streaming, but the audiophiles are now being served by FLAC downloads, which can exceed CD quality. If you poke around bandcamp you’ll find many labels selling vinyl with associated 24bit/96k FLAC downloads tossed in as part of the deal.
In practise, popular music recorded on CDs often had poor mastering (see "loudness wars") where the dynamic range was reduced to make the recording sound louder.
that’s an entirely subjective statement which critically hangs on what “quality” means to the audience.
i don’t agree, but then i’m not limiting myself to define quality in terms of how some signal reproduces sounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture
"Refuge from the grinding frustrations of the hearing world", appreciation of the quality of no sounds, sort of like John Cage's 4'33" but quieter.
Ideally one would own 2 different recording of the songs they like. One for good listening environments and high quality equipment, one for more hostile environments. Or have devices that apply dynamic range compression on the fly when needed.
There's no bit corruption with vinyl like with digital storage formats or disk rot like with cds.
Chemical degradation of CDs can occur over time even in a relatively stable environment. Flash memory is also known to be volatile and most people aren't storing data on flash memory in a redundant storage system.
>If you're that worried, use ZFS or something similar.
I'm not personally storing stuff on vinyl, nor am I "worried", although I have bought a few vinyl that are over 50 years old that play perfectly.
tl;dr version - because i prefer it. doesn’t make it right. doesn’t make it wrong. makes it what it is.
* i prefer the weightiness of vinyl (although it make moving flat a pain in the arse)
* most of the stuff i buy is limited run stuff that wont exist again, each release i buy is its own thing that wont exist again — even later pressing runs can come out different
* a lot of the time, someone putting out a small limited release is a good signal to me they give a shit about what they’re doing, so i pay attention more to what they’ve done, and i enjoy it more as a result
* i like having a wall shelves filled with vinyl in my flat, i like collecting stuff
* i like putting records on and sitting and listening to them and watching them go round and round on my decks, i like interacting with them, i like the feel of them, they feel more intimate than just plugging a USB in and going through a menu
* i’m forced to listen as the artist intended - ain’t no skip or shuffle button!
* beat matching with vinyl is far more of an art form - there ain’t no magic “sync” button when you’re mixing with vinyl
* i think it sounds better
* it’s the hobby i picked and i enjoy it
In this sense, the appeal is not just in the tangible record but also in the ritual of listening to it on a turntable. That process of choosing a record to play and then listen to it is quite a deliberate one, and you probably wouldn’t do it if you didn’t intend to appreciate it. It’s a hobby or an enthusiasm you have and there’s an effort involved in curating your record collection.
I compare that to the process of opening up Spotify of Apple Music where most of that intentionality is stripped away. It serves a totally different purpose as a passive activity, not unlike leaving the radio on in the background, rather than an occasion you’d take time to enjoy.
In my imagination I just picture those scenes in the Bosch TV show where he puts on a classic jazz record, with the view of LA sprawling into the distance in the background. And it wouldn’t be a vibe if he just said ‘Alexa play smooth jazz.’
The holograms are very cool
Is it that you did not realise that specialist equipment is needed to cut a record? (That is you thought the equipment is more commonplace?)
Or is it that you didn’t realised that the equipment is available to be purchased for home use? (That is you thought the equipment is less commonplace?)
I remember there was a Soviet practice of cutting records into old XRays (called "ribs") as a way to bootleg them. I think those cutting machines were made from retrofitted old phonographs.
For black market uses, the consumers was probably willing to bear dreadful audio quality. For a modern aficionado, the quality must be good enough to give some justification for the endeavor.
They look like.... yeah:
Waterproof audio transducers, make by a company called PQN and designed for hot tub sound systems.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/174285036157
I guess that is one way to get a premade, high-displacement, powerful enough voice coil in an easy to mount package at a normal speaker impedance. Genius.
I don't see the appeal of spending $5000 to slowly etch vinyl away manually. If this really is a "craze", it exemplifies to me how those watching influencers get hypnotoaded into pursuing hobbies that have huge upfront costs.
If your business happens to not grow, the capital outlay is less than $10,000.
Seems reasonable, especially if you otherwise have an affinity for vinyl or create your own music.
Before I bought one of these, I insist on being able to play the vinyl and hear it first. So that means you have to be local to me. There are way too many mastering decisions that need to be made correctly for vinyl to sound good. And no, that does not mean being able to take something from your iTunes library mastered for your shitty earbuds.
I do not trust some hobbyist to get any of that right to the point of me willing to pay $10. However, if someone with actual experience with mastering had one of these then I'd be interested, but that dubplate will be way more expensive than $10. A pricetag of $10 tells me the person doing it has no clue about anything involved and has priced themselves too cheap. A person with experience would go broke from the time involved to make any money at $10.
Also, 20 records per week? JeebusChristo that's ambitious. Your sales team would kill your margins at $10 per. Because if you're trying to sell and make the vinyl all by your lonesome, just take the money you were going to invest in getting set up and light it on fire. It'll be faster and much less heartache.
But more importantly, people working in the music industry are excited about these developments. I think you as well should be, given you're a self-professed vinyl lover. All this means more development in cutting heads (the current ones cost tens of thousands!), in lathe equipment for master cutting, and more modern equipment and capable engineers working at pressing plants, many of which have had trouble hiring younger people. It also means more development in materials engineering for vinyl, biodegradable materials being a new movement.
digital:
$1
$2
$3
...
vinyl:
-$4990
-$4980
-$4970
...
That's the most tortured version of that phrase that I've ever seen.
"If you want to make $1 million with a record label, start with $2 million" is the typical way to use the phrase.
Disregarding the hipster crowd, so many of these "fiddlers" also have such a laughably mundane and insipid taste clashing strongly with their proffered love for music that an outside viewer can't help but raise an eyebrow; I mean, when your musical world is made of Steely Dan, Diana Krall, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, etc...
It's just the man equivalent of collecting porcelain figurines, but with an ad hoc rationalization (it really sounds better!) to protect the ego. Related to Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
That might not be what most people care about, and that's fine. They have infinite streaming available for those that just need background noise. But to write vinyl off as a gear acquisition syndrome just screams to me someone doesn't really get it and wants to find a way to mock someone else
CD packaging with jewel cases was a major step down in experience because of size and also because of the inconvenience of getting the booklets out of the case; good CD packaging experiences were exceedingly rare.
Art for streaming is a different medium altogether, as it is behind a screen but potentially dynamic; it can achieve new things, but can't replicate the LP experience any more than photographs can reproduce sculptures.
I'll sound very smug, but so be it: this is a trap very easy to fall in. Are you a "proper" christian if you only are because you fear hell? Do you care about software freedom if you had to be spoonfed baby duck software that looks and feels just like Windows to switch?
I specifically said that claiming it to be a "better sound" is not what I like about vinyl.
So to be very smug, your second graph is absolutely pointless since you've missed the point of the comment you replied
Have you listened to vinyl on a good system? I have trouble believing anybody who says this has ever listened to a decent record on a decent stereo.
Not all vinyl sounds better in my system. Some really is crap. But when I directly compare, and all other things are equal (or seem to be), vinyl normally sounds better than digital.
This is more often true of more recent records, too, though some of Deutsche Grammophone's Archive Production records from even the 50s sound astonishingly good.
I understand that objectively vinyl doesn't measure as well as CD, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sound better. My partner thinks it does, too, and she has no patience for audiophile nonsense.
For what it is, i.e. a rock being dragged through a groove. But I'm very surprised to see this used as example, since orchestral music is the worst case scenario for vinyl: the reduced dynamic range makes good reproduction of those peaks simply impossible (labels like BIS would never have been able to engineer their magic such as on this CD - see the warning on the cover - https://www.discogs.com/release/16832175-Carl-Nielsen-Gothen...) and the surface noise really impacts the quieter moments.
Don't get me wrong, some CDs were brickwalled while the corresponding LP got a way saner master (e.g. Celtic Frost's Monotheist), but with similar masters, CD simply always wins as a medium. In this case, I digitize the LP while its surface wear is at its lowest.
I now see that I didn't understood your comment. Yeah, the vinyl form was interesting back then (because it was cheap) but it sounds like shit to me now. But you see this everywhere a company sees a trend and exploit it: anime figures, nostalgia, ... You can't do anything about it anyway, I gave up on that a long time ago. I draw the line where the whole music itself is disconnected from what you are trying to achieve (treating it as fast food, buying manga in Japanese without being able to read Japanese, any kind of collecting that you don't have the skills to experience...)
One last thing though. You can have better music than all the CDs in the world if you are looking for a private or concert experience. It all depends on what you seek. Woodstock guys thought they would change the world (and they did in their own way), and the Beatles got their own spiritual/mystical experience in India (which George Harrison used to add the sitar in some songs).
I go to a show. There’s maybe 50 people in a dark, dingy room. I want to support the band so I buy a shirt and a record from the merch table.
Sometimes I’m right by the record store so I stop and browse. I see an LP for an album I like, either used or new. I buy it.
Now I have a stack of records. I go home and play records. I still use Spotify.
I remember my aunt saying that she went to a Santana concert in the 70s. She only remembered that "there was a lot of smoke in the room." Did it change her forever? Maybe not, only she knows. But even single experiences can have long-lasting effects that, I'm sure, we'll never be capable of sharing fully.
I once stayed with wealthy tech CEO whose had a very expensive MacIntosh-based stereo, plus some rather expensive looking speakers. His musical library? Grateful Dead, Chicago, Neil Young.
The guy gets the enjoy what he enjoys. More power to him. I just can't imagine spending so much for, musically, so very, very little.
Why wouldn’t you want to listen to them on a nice system?
> Why wouldn’t you want to listen to them on a nice system?
They just aren't my cup of tea.
What it comes down to is that for a lot of people, operating and owning certain equipment is what gives them joy. You see this in a lot, maybe all, of hobbies and pleasure. It’s like the guy who spends $1k on a 3d printer to make trinkets that you can buy at the dollar store.