24 ms·
Vinyl carver sparking a craze for cutting records at home
- moffers 2y agoI didn’t realize there was such special equipment needed to cut a record at home.
- Etheryte 2y agoTruth be told, compared to industrial record production this is pretty mild. This is a very cool project though, and I'm sure plenty of people will love it. Getting vinyl runs done used to be a massive chore, now you can, at least in theory, be like oh I now want that one.
- krisoft 2y agoI’m confused about how you mean by your sentence. 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?)
- hansonkd 2y ago> specialist equipment is needed to cut a record 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.
- 3eb7988a1663 2y ago"Bone records" (https://www.npr.org/2016/01/09/462289635/bones-and-grooves-weird-secret-history-of-soviet-x-ray-music https://www.npr.org/2016/01/09/462289635/bones-and-grooves-w...). 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.
- bsenftner 2y agoAnyone have one and can give personal use details?
- Mizza 2y agoA buddy of mine just acquired one of these machines (actually a beta version of a new product that will hopefully enter the market soon), and I've been helping him along the way as we try to get some good records out of it. 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.
- yapyap 2y agoReading this it sounds like an early 3d printer, where you’d have to manually align stuff and make sure its nicely flat and all that. All in all great fun though!
- namaria 2y agoKnowing what I learned about vinyl mastering back when I was DJing in college... There's about to be a whole lot of shitty records out there.
- 6stringmerc 2y agoAgreed, and that’s why I’m sitting this one out and instead pouring all my investment capital into the next craze, reel-to-reel machines!
- IgorPartola 2y agoTo me there is nothing cooler than a huge reel to reel when it comes to different formats. If I had some free time and space for it I would definitely want to buy one of the giant consoles and then hook up a write head right before the read head so that it can play off any digital source like Spotify but still do it with the huge reels and everything.
- kragen 2y agoI believe that, since a recent fire, there is currently only one company that can electroform the masters necessary for mass pressing of records, as opposed to cutting them one at a time. Despite this "craze" we're closer to losing the technology of pressing phonograph records than we've been since it was invented.
- wsintra2022 2y agoPress on Vinyl are able to make there own masters. Can you clarify what you mean?
- kragen 2y agoI'm kind of vague on the whole lacquer -> father -> mother -> stamper -> record process, and I don't remember which of these steps has supposedly dwindled down to just a single company due to the fire. Googling isn't helping. 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.
- beAbU 2y agoWhat fire?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kragen 2y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221756.
- wsintra 2y agoI can confirm, Press On Vinyl makes their own stampers, originally they sent the masters to London and got stampers back but in the last year or so they upgraded the factory and they now do it all in house. Including a mastering studio, if anyone wants to press vinyl please check out kushtybuckrecords.com or pressonvinyl.com (I am the developer of kushtybuckrecords)
- someothherguyy 2y agoNext they'll record on to tape and burn CD-Rs! 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.
- stogot 2y agoYa when I clicked I was hoping it would be under £400
- i_am_proteus 2y agoIf a record nets $10 per, and you etch 20 records per week, the hobby pays for itself within a year. If your business happens to grow, you could buy another machine and make more records. 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.
- analog31 2y agoThat's $10 more than you can get for selling your recording in digital format online.
- itishappy 2y agodigital: $1 $2 $3 ... vinyl: -$4990 -$4980 -$4970 ... If my wildly estimated pricing is accurate, the break even point is 555 records sold. BandCamp looks to be about $4 per EP (and you'd get maybe $3 of that), so this may be a conservative estimate.
- dylan604 2y agoThat's $10 per, then the buyer needs to pay for shipping, and then taxes. So we're now at least $20 for your etch-a-sketch vinyl. 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.
- andyjohnson0 2y agoI didn't see any mention of precautions relating to vinyl spall/dust produced by these lathes. As far as I know vinyl is toxic, and I'd expect to see some kind of extraction tube or enclosure if this is being done in a domestic setting.
- Mizza 2y agoOne of the many secrets of lathe cutting is that these aren't actually PVC, but rather PETG. They actually play nicer and are more durable than pressed PVC records and can have a lower noise floor. On a good day, we can make a cut record that sounds nicer than a pressed one.
- bjackman 2y agoBack before CDJs people in the UK used to cut records like this for playing unreleased music in clubs. We referred to the material used for this as "acetate" but I don't know what it was technically. You didn't do it at home though, so maybe the businesses that did it had to have air filters. 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.
- Mizza 2y agoAcetates are still used in the manufacturing process - even pressed records need to be cut once - but they aren't great as products to send to home-users because they degrade from usage very quickly. We are also running a soundsystem and mainly cutting for other DJs. Records are cool!
- unitexe 2y agoYou right. This practice lives on in dubstep and soundsystem music in general.
- usrusr 2y agoThat was my first thought reading this: if these devices spread too far, all the magic will be gone. Dubplates are special not because they are one of a kind, they are special because they are one of a kind while also being so much more exclusive than mixtapes (which can be just as one of a kind, but aren't exclusive at all). Widely available home-cut vinyl might perhaps breed an awesome new culture, but if that happens it will definitely kill the incumbent.
- ofrzeta 2y agoIf you are interested in vinyl take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJjkSDObblY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJjkSDObblY 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.
- walthamstow 2y agoWhat's the point in cutting vinyl from a digital source? Fashion? I thought the whole point of vinyl was that it maintains analog from recording to playback
- etothet 2y agoIt depends who you talk to. Some people feel vinyl “sounds more analog” just because of the format. Some people feel it adds natural saturation. In my opinion what matters most is the recording source. That said, bass frequencies respond very different on vinyl. Because of this, it’s pretty common to make a separate master for digital and vinyl. 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.
- redeux 2y agoI think the compression format is what people point to when they say that digital music isn’t as full or “analog” sounding, and that would be true for vinyls made from a source that uses the same format, but there’s also the potential to use the raw WAV file which wouldn’t have this issue even if it’s digital.
- etothet 2y agoIt would be extremely unusual to print a vinyl record from anything less than 44.1 kHz / 16 bit wave or aiff. Also, for what it’s worth you can find online audio tests (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality 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.
- aczerepinski 2y agoFor me part of the appeal is to have something physical that I truly own and can enjoy without being tracked by algorithm. Blue Note Tone Poets (which are analogue all the way) got me into the hobby but I also buy new records, especially when they are available in a signed version.
- goosejuice 2y agoSee Richard Houghten https://www.richardhoughten.com/ https://www.richardhoughten.com/ The holograms are very cool
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- interglossa 2y agoThe fascination with home recording on disc is not new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42037367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42037367
- mk_stjames 2y agoI'm almost positive I've seen those drivers that are being used on the cutting head before... 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 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.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI don't understand vinyl itself, but I understand having a hobby that you can't really explain to other people. Mine is throwing car batteries into the ocean.
- ffsm8 2y agoYour hobby is polluting the local area with highly toxic material? Dang man, that's evil
- TheRealNGenius 2y ago[dead]
- robocat 2y agoA cubic kilometre of untainted seawater (pacific island) contains about 3.5g of Pb. A battery contains about 9000g of Pb. So one battery could affect a lot of seawater IF it were to be soluble. 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 soil
- msds 2y agoVery important habitat restoration for electric eels, actually.
- rational_indian 2y agoBuy a CD burner and make your own CDs! Much easier.