Posted by vthommeret 16 hours ago
One thing I didn't realize for a long time is that it turns out that a lot of these machines have a digital stage. To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible. But the spiral isn't fixed, it's adjusted dynamically. Quiet sections can be packed close together. That means that before cutting, the machine needs to know how much physical space it needs for the audio it's about to put on the disk. And that requires a buffer, and that's very often digital. So it turns out there's precious little vinyl out there without a digital step being involved out there.
Not that it matters anyway, since vinyl is a pretty terrible technology, but still, it's kind of funny.
Strictly speaking, the grooves only need to be cut as close as necessary in order for music to fit, while remaining far-enough apart that they don't interact too much.
Packing as many grooves (and thus as much material) as possible onto one side of a disk isn't always a goal, although it can be a goal.
> But the spiral isn't fixed, it's adjusted dynamically. Quiet sections can be packed close together.
Aye. Or the whole thing can be made quieter. Or dynamically-compressed first, and then made quieter. Or if it's a relatively short work, it can tolerate being louder and/or more-dynamic even though that takes up more physical space. There's lots of knobs here, and all of these knobs can be turned.
> That means that before cutting, the machine needs to know how much physical space it needs for the audio it's about to put on the disk.
That's not quite right. The process should ideally know this in advance, but that process can include a skilled human operator. And since we still have humans, it is not necessary for the machine itself to figure all of this out on its own.
Like many other kinds of machine work, a lot of it can be boiled down to some moral equivalent of speeds and feeds. There's a good chance that you've worked with this at home with a 3D printer by winding things up or down manually as a print progresses and observing the results. (Except: This is subtractive instead of additive, and we hear the results instead of seeing them.)
I see nothing that suggests that this record lathe can't be manually controlled. Instead, I see suggestion (based on the snippet about locked grooves being possible) that very fine, deliberate control is exactly what it is made to allow.
One can therefore add whatever knobs they want at whatever layer the combination of this device and one's skills permit, and send it. If the process fails, then learn from that and try again.
It's OK when it fails. Fucking things up is a time-honored tradition: At most stages of the recording/mixing/mastering/distribution process, it's pretty uncommon to one-shot anything.
Blank discs aren't necessarily expensive. It's OK to fuck them up.
The page says DAW integration, but I assume the inputs are analog. IE, I assume the playback is on the computer and uses whatever DAC the engineer has set up.
> To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible.
In the analog, computer-free world, that was done by hand and typically had about 15-20 minutes per side. I've come across records that got close to 30 minutes per side, from the late 1960s or 1970s, and very specifically mentioned that it was a computer-controlled process. (And also that you needed to turn the volume up.)
At that time they used a Studer A80 (if memory serves) 1/2 track machine, modified, with an extra playback head that was placed before the head stack so it read the music on tape about 500mS before the playback head got it. The extra head sound was fed to the motor controller that controlled the speed of the cutting head feed motor that turned the screw that controlled the pitch depth of the grooves.
When the preview head sound was loud, the screw motor would slow down to make bigger grooves and then return to normal when the audio envelope was smaller.
That's how they optimized groove spacing before digital buffers. :-)
In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.
There’s composition, where music is written. A drum track may be a boring repetitive loop quantized to 4/4 beat positions, or it may have fills or polyrhythm or free time or who knows what.
There’s performance, which may be a sequencer just outputting notes at the right time or may be a human drummer of varying skill, imparting sloppiness or brilliant micro timing.
There’s recording, which today is virtually always digital, but which can theoretically be analogue tape or other exotic forms.
There’s storage medium, where we get vinyl or FLAC or MP3.
And there’s playback, where your choice of system components matters.
You can digitally record, mix, and master a bunch of drunk teenagers who don’t know how to play, and I promise it will be gloriously analog. And you can take music that was composed on an sequencer with pure quantization and no human feel at all, record/master/mix digitally, and store it on vinyl and play it in a good system and the sound will have analog warmth even while the composition and performance do not.
There’s more artistry in music today than there ever has been. More music is release every single day than was released in any entire year before 2000.
You just have to find the good stuff. If you’re hearing boring corporate crap, that reflects a need to improve discovery skill to match this new world.
Some albums you cannot get digitally with the best sounding master version.
When I find something new, I like to look up live performances from that artist on YouTube. Sometimes people in the comments mention other similar artists or the source that led them to the video. YouTube's algorithm is a bit of a dark and dangerous thing overall, but I do sometimes follow a suggestion for music that I end up loving.
I think a willingness to listen to unfamiliar albums and unfamiliar genres is all you really need. I look for “best of X” lists, which get posted everywhere from actual newspapers to niche sites nline forums, Twitter, and personal blogs. Type in different values for “X” and you get exposure to more music.
> So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists
I’m sure the session musicians don’t appreciate this statement. Just because they can play with high precision and reliability doesn’t mean they are playing without soul.
If the featured artists can’t do so on their own, that’s sort of a knock on them, isn’t it?
Incredibly daft over-generalization, the music scene is enormous, and while for mainstream artists what you say is certainly true, you're forgetting about the rest of the 80% of the music scene, which is mostly just people who like making music and don't even earn enough to make a living from it.
In pop music this has been true since the 60s. For independent music it has mostly never been true. This hasn't changed much.
Most vinyl record buyers buy records as a collectable to show that they like a certain album, not because they're deluded audiophiles who are trying to eliminate everything digital from their audio path. Half of all record buyers don't even own a record player: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50-of-vinyl-buyers-do... . When you look at it from that lens, I think it makes sense that records are so popular. They're the largest music format so you get the biggest version of the album art and the most extensive set of liner notes compared to buying a CD or something. Audio quality or "analogness" doesn't matter, since they're probably going to be listening to the album on Spotify instead anyway.
“Look ahead” to determine optimal groove spacing doesn’t have to be done digitally, even though digital makes this much simpler.
I’d guess that musicians and producers using an all-analogue recording / mixing / mastering process where they have zero digital stages to the master tape are very few and far between nowadays. Kevin Shields for one, but he likely has other options for his analogue master disk cutting, and only needs to attend disc cutting once or twice a decade/century.
A transparent digital stage for the master isn’t going to make a huge amount of difference really, and the limited bandwidth of vinyl compared to digital means that the vinyl master has to be squashed and limited regardless.
Dam right. It’s a medium that a reasonably intelligent individual from any time in future/past history could intuitively understand. Let’s not forget that NASA chose a record to store the digital images it sent with Voyager on precisely that assumption.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...
Laser Turntable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
Click and Pop Removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LvCRzWCpU
On the other hand you can play a phonograph record by sticking your fingernail into the groove!
The Church of Scientology has done a lot of work towards preservation of the (worthless!) works of L. Ron Hubbard
https://www.colinsjamjar.com/p/scientologists-jumpstarted-th...
focused around things like laser engraving and phonograph records made of durable materials such that people would be able to read them with whatever technology we have in the future.
If they are using well refined conversion paths with enough bit depth, that buffer stage will be completely invisible even at the waveform level.
As a person who likes, buys and listens vinyl, I don't care how it's processed to that stage as long as it sounds fine. Note that I don't buy vinyl because of the "sound quality per se", but for the experience of listening it. I like to make time to listen my favorite albums properly, and vinyl is a part of that for some albums. I'm equally fine with audio from a CD or a well encoded lossy codec. I can distinguish between lossy and lossless encoding of the same album, but I don't always have time to appreciate that.
So, some references (This guy has enough knowledge to write his own DSP plugins):
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuecg-5Gvn8
How much shorter would an LP be if you used a fixed pitch?
70 years ago Miles Davis vibrates some air with his horn, which is translated into electricity by a microphone, which is translated through magnetic tape and eventually back into electricity and then back into vibrations on a disk. 70 years later I can take that disk and turn its vibrations back into electricity that moves the air on my living room. No encoding, no decoding, just air and electricity that my ancestors will be able to replay until the end of time.
That's as close to magic as anything humanity has ever come up with in my opinion.
Personally I see far more magic in digital electronics. Storing vibrations physically is neat and clever, but none of that looks particularly magic to me. Just a straightforward, logical solution to a problem. More elegant simplicity than magic really.
I enjoy all those things you've listed as bad :shrug:
Contrast that with several folders of CDs I still have which have begun to delaminate and are plastic trash now. CDs were largely an invention to allow record companies to resell back catalogs, and it worked.
You could do it with more than two grooves, just to having them at 360/n degrees apart. You’ll just have to make the groove spacing wider as the number of tracks go off. Of course that comes at the cost of playback tine.
EDIT- Apparently it was the K-Tel Superstar game
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4521/k-tel-superstar-gam...
https://www.discogs.com/master/19554-De-La-Soul-Me-Myself-An...
Side 4 has a double groove, which would give you either The Great Escape + Made again (a sort of a happy ending) or The Great Escape + 20 minutes of water sounds (which can be interpreted as the sad ending).
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(Marillion_album)#Vinyl_... (I also have a copy and can confirm indeed it works like that).
Is there a performative and marketing element? sure. But that's the music world, a great deal is performative. We have depended on patrons who want to support the arts and be seen supporting the arts for time immemorial.
FWIW, You can get 100 records + jackets printed professionally for ~$10 a pop.
Gakken toy record cutter is low quality, but costs $160.
I wonder what this would cost. Surely it's impractical for personal use, as marketed.
My spouse bought one on a whim. The quality is ... quite bad. It's a tool for learning about how this works though! So it was a fun little activity. But it really is "just" what it is.
Maybe Teenage Engineering's toy that looks like is exactly the same tech is better. I have my doubts.
Cool project but the opposite of democratization.
This is a video about Amen Break, read from a wax disc which can't survive more than 5-6 plays.
Actual transcription lathes will be much more expensive and I think can record on better material. Those can be used for direct to disc recording production. I’m not sure if what TE and Dinsync offer can make something that can be used for production.
Their hours are "2:30 PM to 12 Midnight", I sort of believe... 7 days a week?
Rich will actually answer the phone, and guide you. I've done it a few times (it's an incredibly cool gift). A single record is $12. Extremely worth experiencing it.
I've done it twice and had a great experience, although in the 10X pricing range compared to recordcut.com.
I've used https://www.online-druck.biz/lp-cover.html for the sleeve, but I don't know if they ship internationally.
That escalated quickly... Are you ok?