11 ms·
Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
- DocTomoe 6y agoIf ever the Voyager records are found by extraterrestrials, this is likely how they would analyse and eventually play the record.
- TonyTrapp 6y agoFinally we can listen to analog media with distinctively digital artefacts! Nice experiment.
- timonoko 6y agoYes. But can you make vinyl records with laser printer? If you print on transparent, there are clearly ridges which could be enuff to guide a needle. I do not have record player anymore, so I cannot test this.
- Spare_account 6y agoI'm curious about the date tag (2013)? Wayback Machine does indeed has archives of the page from 2013 onwards, but while googling "Vinyl-ROM" (inspired by comments in this thread) I found a reference to this exact huji.ac.il page in a comment thread on Halfbakery dating back to 2003: https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Vinyl-ROM https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Vinyl-ROM In fact the parent URL does have WayBack archives going back to the early 2000s, which include this content. dang: I nominate the date for this item should be listed as 2003. http://web.archive.org/web/20030221050553/http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/ http://web.archive.org/web/20030221050553/http://www.cs.huji...
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoso freaking old previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2098115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2098115
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoInternet Archive just posted a thing a few days ago about their process for digitizing records. Is that why you dug this up? https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1386423512810721284 https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/13864235128107212... And here's all the discussion from a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26942509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26942509
- geocrasher 6y agoThese are so wonderfully distorted. I am getting somewhere between the signal in the movie "Contact" and whispers of the hive mind of the Borg. Amazing sounds, even if they aren't true to the recording.
- blackearl 6y agoYou might like The Caretaker. It's less about the music itself and more about how your mind and memories slowly deteriorate with age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caretaker_(musician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caretaker_(musician)
- elevaet 6y agoHauntology!
- dmje 6y agoYeh. Thinking they'd make a pretty rad segment in an ambient track
- S_A_P 6y agoAside from the slight wah wah effect they are pretty great. I immediately loaded them up in my S2400 and resampled them to 12bit 26khz to add much aliasing Sample C2 is especially haunting this way.
- marcodiego 6y agoThinking about a simpler system... how about getting a camera on a turntable recording a video while the record turns. It would then be possible to track a line with an specified width in the video and turn the changes in a piece of this line it into a waveform.
- verelo 6y agoThis would be a cool project
- porterde 6y agoAlso capture the audio sample from the same record alongside the video. Repeat with lots of records. Train a model to predict the audio from the video. Voila! Play records with just the camera “stylus”...
- 3dee 6y agoI once thought about building this, but it's much harder than you think. The data has to be processed very quickly. I believe you should think in terms of 0.3m groove per second. If you put a camera above the groove you also need something like a stepper motor to control the arm. But I believe the biggest problem is dust. A needle will move small particles out of the way, but a camera does not. This is also why laser turntables need 'clipping' filters. Dust will create all kinds of noise you don't want to hear.
- IndySun 6y ago>The data has to be processed very quickly. How about designing an arm that used more than one laser 'needle'?
- Scene_Cast2 6y agoI remember wondering whether a laser "needle" could work. IIRC the format has some funky EQ and other things to make a physical needle work better.
- marcodiego 6y agoAlready exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
- voldacar 6y agonot cheap, but yeah it works great. https://www.elpj.com/ https://www.elpj.com/ I actually got to hear one once. Extremely neutral and high-res, but the record has to be super clean because with the laser, you will hear every little speck of dust. Also it doesn't work with colored vinyl, iirc. edit: they use 5 different lasers to get the data out of the groove, go read the section on their site, it's actually really intricate and cool > the format has some funky EQ and other things to make a physical needle work better Yes, in order to fit the high bandwidth music signal into a groove with a fixed width, the bass is EQed down and treble EQed up, since for a constant velocity sine wave, a low frequency wave would take up more physical width on the record than a high frequency wave. Without this EQ, you would only be able to store a small amount of music on a record. When the record is played, your phono preamp applies an inverted EQ curve to restore the signal to its original frequency response. In the past, there were lots of different vinyl equalization curves, but the RIAA curve has been standard for decades now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago"The record has to be super clean..." Audiophiles likely know of this, but I'm still surprised. Clean vinyl records with glue... https://everyrecordtellsastory.com/2015/05/25/how-to-deep-clean-your-vinyl-records-with-wood-glue-and-ten-things-that-you-shouldnt-use-to-clean-your-lps/ https://everyrecordtellsastory.com/2015/05/25/how-to-deep-cl...
- 6y ago
- marcodiego 6y agoOther related projects: http://recherche.ina.fr/eng/Details-projets/saphir https://irene.lbl.gov/
- elevation 6y agoDon't forget https://www.windytan.com/2017/07/gramophone-audio-from-photograph.html https://www.windytan.com/2017/07/gramophone-audio-from-photo...
- marcodiego 6y agoAnd this one too: https://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/extracting-audio-from-pictures/ https://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/extractin...
- megaserg 6y agoI've made a simple encoder/decoder some time ago: https://github.com/megaserg/schallplatten https://github.com/megaserg/schallplatten
- thanatos519 6y agoThis is art!
- the_local_host 6y agoFor some reason this reminds me of the Feynman article on HN recently ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 ) - the enjoyment in pursuing something just because you think it would be fun.
- Hfjfjdjfjceijfj 6y agoStero channels aren't encoded in the depth and radial axes. They're encoded in the same plane, but rotated 45 degrees, so a mono record player (depth only) plays a balanced sum of each channel. Edit: mono is radial only, not depth.
- MrsPeaches 6y agoFor anyone else who was intrigued by this, I found this helpful animation: https://www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html https://www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoWell, that definitely hurt my brain.
- radomir_cernoch 6y agoWow, the best example of teaching minimalism I know. Even though the website fails on so many levels, ;-) I still get the message in 15 seconds.
- hulitu 6y agoMaybe you are looking at the wrong one ? It loads instantly. I do not have to zoom to read the text. No node.js, cdn and other curses of "modern" web. The only annoying thing is that the guy went to great lenghts to get the audio only to convert it later to mp3. I guess there is no hope. ( it could have been worse - webm).
- jakecopp 6y agoIt reminds my of the Hyperphysics [1] website, which I believe borrows from Apple's Hypercard (pre World World Web) information tech! [1]: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html
- Fnoord 6y agoThis website, as well as the one in the thread's URL, are exactly in the way as I learned the WWW was when I first started using it.
- tmountain 6y agoI remember seeing something online a very log time ago where someone was using Perl to encode audio into image files (jpeg IIRC) and then subsequently decoding them (losing fidelity in the process). Even though I understand the science that makes this work, it still feels like magic. Love it.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoRandom Q: do I have a damaged/bent stylus if a certain record (Toots and the Maytals' Pressure Drop picture disc) goes silent at several different times? I checked the stylus force scale at the different test points, and it's right in the middle of the cartridge specs. Every other record plays fine, except some new records play slow and/or some carve out a thin hair of lacquer/enamel the first time. This always makes me think some sort of damage is happening from a misaligned cartridge. But, other good quality and used records don't do this and work fine. It's an AT microline cartridge.
- ndeast 6y agoIf it is just happening with a specific record (especially a picture disc) it's likely not your stylus and just the pressing. You can give cleaning your record and stylus a shot and see if that helps. If records are playing slow make sure if your table is belt driven your belts are still in good condition. Also make sure your tonearm height and anti-skate are properly adjusted. Cleaning your records before you play them (even brand new records) is important.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoIt's a direct-drive Panasonic PL-5 with the internal calibration strobe, so no belt. I always clean them with a Zerostat and Discwasher. And have a Japanese stylus cleaner too (the stuff that looks like a breast implant for mice porn stars.) The local record store has the same record, maybe they'd compare them?
- quijoteuniv 6y agoThis post somehow made me think that Carl Sagan golden record was not just a stupid idea. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-reco...
- tantalor 6y agoThe "decodings" are awful.
- TonyTrapp 6y agoAnd that's okay. Not every experiment needs to be a successful one or have perfect results. It's not like the author is so self-absorbed that they claim they are good. They explicitly say the decodings are "nearly-intelligible".
- dylan604 6y agoI can't tell the difference between the inability of this process to capture the audio and the distortion one normally hears introduced by MP3 compression. </s>
- Dylovell 6y agoThe next thing will be electron microscope scans of of the instruments the artists used. I'm joking. I really want well digitized vinyl
- kurthr 6y agoYou're joking, but based on the dynamic range (claimed by audiophiles) over a min length of ~160um (more on the outside less interior for 2kHz tone) and the peak motion ~37um per channel. PVC grains are typically 100s of um in size, but the monomers themselves are ~10nm. Note that with 120dB claimed dynamic range this would be 37nm of deflection (at 45deg or 25nm lateral) for full resolution. That is close (3x off) to molecular Atomic Force Microscopy. Of course what is encoded is actually force/velocity which in turn is inductively coupled out, but it is no surprise that simple optical scanning gives you mediocre results. Even 10x lower dynamic range requires 250nm optical resolution. It's doable, but not easy.
- ByThyGrace 6y agoThanks for the informative explanation! If say an 12-inch LP is scanned at 250nm optical resolution, what output digital image resolution are we talking here (in pixels)?
- kurthr 6y agoIt would be truly terrifying resolution. Just a 4"x4" area at 10um resolution would be 10k resolution. Here's a good place to look for vinyl LP info: http://www.gzvinyl.com/About-vinyl.aspx http://www.gzvinyl.com/About-vinyl.aspx
- Koshkin 6y agoNow I'm dreaming about a program that would simply play a high-res photograph (scan) of a vinyl disk... This also reminds me of the idea to use paper for archival. This is based on two factors: that modern office paper is extremely durable (and is likely to outlast most of the other physical media out there), and that scanners are (and have been for years now) extremely high-resolution; so, you can simply print the bits (say, of a zip file) as dots, and then you could use a scanner to read the file back!
- wwn_se 6y agoInteresting concept the biggest problem would probably be data density. Like how many papers would you need to to get about dvd size. Other than than the problems in getting a reader dvds is one of the best current long time solution.
- Koshkin 6y agoWith, say, 1200 dots per inch it would be nothing to sneeze at...
- m463 6y agoyou would still need to use a de-linted discwasher with de-ionized water: https://archive.org/details/stereo-review-presents-stereo-buyers-guide-1989/page/39/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/stereo-review-presents-stereo-bu...
- jccalhoun 6y agohttps://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/patrick-feaster-discovered-a-way-to-listen-to-vanished-gramophone-recordings.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/patrick-feaster-dis...
- weirdkid 6y agoLike the old Cauzin Strip Reader.
- abrookewood 6y agoCoding Horror has an overview of some paper based archive options: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-paper-data-storage-option/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-paper-data-storage-option/
- aidenn0 6y agoI wonder; could one project a horizontal line on a disc, a camera at an offset angle, and use the apparent deviations from a straight line for digitizing a record? I know there are full-analog laser players, but a full-digital solution might let you do fancy tricks to remove dust, particularly if you used multiple wavelengths of light, as slide scanners do.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eigenhombre 6y agoCarl Haber, a guy I worked with at LBNL[1] about twenty years ago pioneered this technique, at least as far as I know. The really cool thing about it is how it can be used to play very fragile recordings without damaging them. "The method has been used to successfully play several recordings for the first time, including an 1860 phonautogram, the oldest known sound recording of a human voice, and the only known recording of Alexander Graham Bell’s voice." [1] https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2013/carl-haber https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2013/carl-haber
- tingletech 6y agoI saw him present about around 20 years ago at the I School Friday afternoon seminar in South Hall. At the time, there was a weird warble.
- Spare_account 6y agoFWIW this content is approximately 19 years old (the date in the title is incorrect). Wayback machine has archived content going back to 2002ish. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959024