This isn't that but their "record factory" toy[0]... I'm like 90% sure is the same thing as something Gakken released in Japan for half the price as a little fun toy[1]

Even in the age of the internet there's a huge business in people basically taking a "normal" thing from another market and then rebadging it to release as an elevated thing.

Studio neat has a $231 tiny box cutter[2]. OLFA (A "professional" box cutter maker) sells a 2 pack of tiny box cutters that probably are 5x more ergonomic on account of being made to be used instead of to look nice on a website, for $10. [3]

The best version of a thing is likely whatever people who do it all day use. But you can totally make a market for consumers who want "fashionable" things but who don't really get the space.

Studio Neat is a big offender on this honestly... basically all of their stuff have "better" things at least at half the cost just available in random stationary stores. I'm all for wasting money on pens, but at least waste them on good pens!

[0]: https://teenage.engineering/products/po-80

[1]: https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200

[2]: https://www.studioneat.com/products/keen

[3]: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/OLFA-Compact-Knife-Pieces-95B2...

Teenage Engineering seems to run partly on hype and halo effect. It makes cool things you can’t afford, and you buy something cheaper. Selling a vinyl cutting machine keeps them in the news, which keeps them in your mind, and then you think about how you always wanted an OP-1 but oh maybe you could buy the EP-133 instead.

I’m sure there’s a price at which the vinyl cutter is profitable.

There is one company that sells similar lathe cutters in Europe. To aquire it you need to go on a multi day training in a remote Swiss forest. Then it’s around 10.000 EUR in equipment, granted you supply your own record player (sl1200 ~700EUR). But yeah cutting high quality stereo records is an art. No matter the money you throw at it, it will involve a lot of maintenance, skill, experience, spare parts, mastering skills, consumables, and time (these cut in real time). Indeed, who wants to do that? I welcome any effort in this niche though!

I have a real “I was born yesterday” feeling having realized that “Teenage Engineering” has nothing to do with making audio tech accessible to young newcomers.

There’s certainly novelty to this, I’d love one if the price were reasonable. Direct capture, almost like a polaroid for vinyl records, no need to “develop” it.

I imagine artists could sell a super-limited (i.e. 1 copy) live recording of a show the second it ends for a premium, especially if they kept the machine on stage and personally packaged and signed it.

These are Designed. The target audience has tremendous disposable income, and Taste (subjectively, of course.)

No one is buying this for economy’s sake.

>> "who wants to own cutting vinyl?"

Well, Sega gamers for one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c744iD0_fWU

There used to be places where you could make your own one-of-a-kind record: pretty much direct microphone to vinyl¹ which I’m guessing this essentially is. But that said, I kind of feel like most of Teenage Engineering is more stunt than practical.

⸻

1. A booth for making records like this plays a role in the plot of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Elvis Presley’s very first recordings were a similar thing, the two sides recorded in a booth to make a singular record to give his mother as a present in 1953.

Are there bootlegs on vinyl? Maybe now there can be.

Might I introduce you to the concept of dub plates? I absolutely love playing vinyl as a dj, and being able to cut my own would be worth it to me. Some people are just silly about their hobbies even without going into lalaland like an audiophile. Growing up, my dad had an 8-track recorder and a box of blank cassettes. I would record my music to them as the car I drove still had an 8-track player. It's goofy. It's fun. It's not logical per se, but it's also not hurting you. So leave me to my idiosyncrasies and go back to your Spotify feed and obey and consume as you do

Producing a lathe cut is the first (physical) step of many of pressing vinyl.

This isn’t targeting consumers, or even record stores, but record pressing plants.

This is kind of a big deal because this sort of fundamental equipment hasn’t been available new for decades. The vast majority of plants/mastering facilities are using old Scully lathes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Those are getting ever older and harder to source parts for, and with the vinyl boom the number of pressing plants is actually going up.

Back when I DJ'd techno in the 90s I would have killed for this for what it could bring creatively to a set. Just the ability to cut my own tracks onto white labels and put custom loops etc on vinyl would have really changed things entirely without having to front a whole bunch of cash (which I def did not have) to get a batch of records pressed which probably nobody else would order or play.

But now mixing is done digitally and playing with vinyl is a mostly lost art and it's trivial to put your own material together into audio files and mix it.

Vinylrecorder.com

There’s been a market for this for nearly 30 years (and the rest).

Market: music industry veterans that won the race and have boutique record labels for small runs of obscure or promotional or small bands. Have five records printed for the merch table and the next show. Once you have the machine hopefully the marginal cost of a record would make sense for extremely small runs.

Where a band with no money might struggle to afford a $1000 minimum run somewhere else, they might be able to make beer money at a show with records made on one of these. Probably not "economical" in the machine may never pay for itself, but somebody rich buying one as a mechanism to promote musicians on a small scale probably makes sense to them.

Teenage Engineering has the market of people who have a lot of money to spend on a hobby, want a fancy product design and don't care about cost.

The exception is their PO series stuff which is actually kind of affordable for what you can get out of them.

Nor any clue on what blanks cost. But I could see the thrill of this if money was no object.

I would buy a machine that makes new floppy disk media if it existed, and not because of any economical argument.

I would buy a machine that makes new laserdiscs if it existed, and not because of any economical argument.

... aluminized paper for electric arc printers

... wax film thermal print head ribbon

... a re-inker for cloth typewriter ribbon (at least this one is straightforward to design and build myself some day)

... extra wide cloth matrix printer ribbon with 4 colors

... 1.9mm magnetic tape for exatron wafers

A record cutter has way more potential audience than any of those. They will sell every one they can even manage to make.

Maybe a party novelty for hipsters.

This stuff is like expensive watches. If there was no one to show it off to there would be no one who would buy it.

Sir, I commend you for your lack of taste for aesthetics, "coolness", and for maintaining the cynical, pessimistic Hackernews status quo.

I've been worried this place has gotten eternal september'd full of redditors, AI bots, and low-IQ emotional mainstream political rants.

But then you swoop in here and remind me that it's still 2007 in Hackernews land: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Never change.

Because brittle really is a second name for Flexi disc. They have shallower groove which means limited dynamic range, higher hiss/surface noise/distortion, plus because they are so light they often don't sit flat on a turntable so welcome speed variations aka "wow and flutter" and frequent skipping. You could listen 500-1000 times to normal vinyl before any audible degradation and the same may happen to Flexi disc after 5 or 10 times.

Worse sound quality and even worse longevity.

Tungsten will certainly isolate better than other softer metals. The entire product is centred around embedding vibrations into a physical object. The material that is used to transfer or isolate those vibrations is important especially at signal levels used in lathe cutting.

I suppose its better than it being made of rust like so many other projects like to advertise.

Master is carved (cutted), and then reverse master pressed, from which all the records are then pressed, if i remember correctly.

The original master is cut. Only subsequent copies are pressed. This is the standard way records are made

You need to carve the master to have something to press from.