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How does it buffer audio? 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

How does it buffer audio? 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.

odeono 4mo ago
[dead]
gizajob 4mo ago
It’s great technology for long-term archiving. “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.
- Daub 4mo ago
  > I’s great technology for long-term archiving. 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-record-overview/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...
  - bayindirh 4mo ago
    Also it can be "read" non intrusively with a laser-pickup, like a CD, without wearing the medium down.
    - PaulHoule 4mo ago
      It works and sounds like a good idea but boy do lasers see dust spots and things like that.
      - bayindirh 4mo ago
        I believe they indeed do, but for digitizing rare records, they are much better than their physical counterparts. Considering that we can now remove these pops and clicks way better than we did before, it's a worthy thing to have for preservation purposes: Laser Turntable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable Click and Pop Removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LvCRzWCpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LvCRzWCpU
        ufocia 4mo ago
        Archival optical media is likely much better than any kind of open groove technology.
        PaulHoule 4mo ago
        I dunno if Blu-Ray players are going to exist 100 or 1000 years from now, but it could be very challenging to recreate them. 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-the-vinyl 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.
- ufocia 4mo ago
  Vinyl is not great for archiving. It degrades and is affected by dust.
bayindirh 4mo ago
There's digital and there's digital. If you look at some of the technology used for A/D and D/A conversion, it's possible to do it lossless way. I learnt this after I started recording my bass and this is a very deep rabbit hole. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuecg-5Gvn8 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-MGXDXR4x0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-MGXDXR4x0 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fmCy686IC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fmCy686IC8
Jgrubb 4mo ago
Vinyl is a terrible technology?? Have you never put on an old record and considered the miracle of it? 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.
- dale_glass 4mo ago
  It is bad by modern standards. Low capacity, high noise, imperfect stereo separation, pretty bad frequency response. CD quality audio solves every problem perfectly and it's old and dirt cheap at this point. To even approach that with vinyl you have to fuss over needles, weight, turntable mechanics and so on and and spend a lot of money and still won't get there. 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.
  - dijksterhuis 4mo ago
    It's bad, according to your definition of what good is. I enjoy all those things you've listed as bad :shrug:
    - Jgrubb 4mo ago
      Yes. Not to mention, I have several crates of records that I've had since the 90s. Some of those were taken from my dad collection that he bought new back in the 60s. Those albums still play just fine, despite less than archival care taken. 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.
jlarcombe 4mo ago
yes, they mostly use a digital delay, although some mastering houses still have a reel-to-reel equipped with an extra 'preview' head that gives the required lookahead for the lathe without any A/D conversion in the audio path.
taylodl 4mo ago
Most music today is digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered. It's at the end they distribute it on vinyl and sell it for a fortune. They're literally fleecing people. Now I will tell you digital is far superior to analog BUT - the way music is recorded and mixed today takes all the soul out of music. Rigidly fixing to "the grid" makes it so music can't breathe. Drums are programmed. So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists. In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.
- brookst 4mo ago
  You’ve mixed up a few different stages as well as the reason some people prefer vinyl. 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.
  - strogonoff 4mo ago
    What’s your current process for discovering new music?
voidpointer 4mo ago
To implement groove packing digitally, you don't need to put that process in the signal chain, do you? You can digitize the master, analyze it, and determine the required spacing at various points on the record. You then feed that information back to the machine to control the cutting processes, as the analog signal is transferred directly to the record. No digital buffer in the signal path.
ssl-3 4mo ago
> To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible. 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.
gwbas1c 4mo ago
> How does it buffer audio? 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.)
- lebuffon 4mo ago
  Old guy here. I brought a few masters into RCA in Toronto, just before dinosaurs went extinct. 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. :-)
  - ufocia 4mo ago
    Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
  - gwbas1c 4mo ago
    I still wonder if the circuitry was analog or digital, though. That could have been an analog "computer".
    - lebuffon 4mo ago
      In my case it was around 1975ish. There was no digital circuitry in signal paths then. If you are asking how the thread pitch motor controller was working I have no in depth knowledge but it would likely be an analog envelope detector. (simple RC filter/integrator would suffice) That would be rectified to make a DC control voltage and the control voltage would be used to modulate the power to the motor in an inverse fashion. ( more audio signal -> less power ) No digits would be harmed in the process. :)
alnwlsn 4mo ago
Do you need to, or only if you care about fitting the longest possible recording on the disk? How much shorter would an LP be if you used a fixed pitch?
- picofarad 4mo ago
  Well, mindless self indulgence is very loud and aggresive, so an album that is a single CD is 2 vinyls. I'd have to use my usb record player and rip some records and determine loudness vs length to get some baseline, though. Then again, maybe most CD albums are two LPs, I only have a half dozen 2-LP albums, most older stuff is single LP. Is that because albums have gotten longer, or louder? Both?
ghostly_s 4mo ago
I would guess if anyone wants to use this thing it will mostly be for 12" singles, optimal groove packing is not a concern for them.

odeono 4mo ago

[dead]

gizajob 4mo ago

It’s great technology for long-term archiving. “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.

Daub 4mo ago
> I’s great technology for long-term archiving. 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-record-overview/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...
- bayindirh 4mo ago
  Also it can be "read" non intrusively with a laser-pickup, like a CD, without wearing the medium down.
  - PaulHoule 4mo ago
    It works and sounds like a good idea but boy do lasers see dust spots and things like that.
    - bayindirh 4mo ago
      I believe they indeed do, but for digitizing rare records, they are much better than their physical counterparts. Considering that we can now remove these pops and clicks way better than we did before, it's a worthy thing to have for preservation purposes: Laser Turntable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable Click and Pop Removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LvCRzWCpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LvCRzWCpU
      - ufocia 4mo ago
        Archival optical media is likely much better than any kind of open groove technology.
        PaulHoule 4mo ago
        I dunno if Blu-Ray players are going to exist 100 or 1000 years from now, but it could be very challenging to recreate them. 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-the-vinyl 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.
ufocia 4mo ago
Vinyl is not great for archiving. It degrades and is affected by dust.

bayindirh 4mo ago

There's digital and there's digital. If you look at some of the technology used for A/D and D/A conversion, it's possible to do it lossless way. I learnt this after I started recording my bass and this is a very deep rabbit hole. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuecg-5Gvn8 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-MGXDXR4x0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-MGXDXR4x0 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fmCy686IC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fmCy686IC8

Jgrubb 4mo ago

Vinyl is a terrible technology?? Have you never put on an old record and considered the miracle of it? 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.

dale_glass 4mo ago
It is bad by modern standards. Low capacity, high noise, imperfect stereo separation, pretty bad frequency response. CD quality audio solves every problem perfectly and it's old and dirt cheap at this point. To even approach that with vinyl you have to fuss over needles, weight, turntable mechanics and so on and and spend a lot of money and still won't get there. 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.
- dijksterhuis 4mo ago
  It's bad, according to your definition of what good is. I enjoy all those things you've listed as bad :shrug:
  - Jgrubb 4mo ago
    Yes. Not to mention, I have several crates of records that I've had since the 90s. Some of those were taken from my dad collection that he bought new back in the 60s. Those albums still play just fine, despite less than archival care taken. 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.

jlarcombe 4mo ago

yes, they mostly use a digital delay, although some mastering houses still have a reel-to-reel equipped with an extra 'preview' head that gives the required lookahead for the lathe without any A/D conversion in the audio path.

taylodl 4mo ago

Most music today is digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered. It's at the end they distribute it on vinyl and sell it for a fortune. They're literally fleecing people. Now I will tell you digital is far superior to analog BUT - the way music is recorded and mixed today takes all the soul out of music. Rigidly fixing to "the grid" makes it so music can't breathe. Drums are programmed. So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists. In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.

brookst 4mo ago
You’ve mixed up a few different stages as well as the reason some people prefer vinyl. 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.
- strogonoff 4mo ago
  What’s your current process for discovering new music?

voidpointer 4mo ago

To implement groove packing digitally, you don't need to put that process in the signal chain, do you? You can digitize the master, analyze it, and determine the required spacing at various points on the record. You then feed that information back to the machine to control the cutting processes, as the analog signal is transferred directly to the record. No digital buffer in the signal path.

ssl-3 4mo ago

> To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible. 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.

gwbas1c 4mo ago

> How does it buffer audio? 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.)

lebuffon 4mo ago
Old guy here. I brought a few masters into RCA in Toronto, just before dinosaurs went extinct. 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. :-)
- ufocia 4mo ago
  Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
- gwbas1c 4mo ago
  I still wonder if the circuitry was analog or digital, though. That could have been an analog "computer".
  - lebuffon 4mo ago
    In my case it was around 1975ish. There was no digital circuitry in signal paths then. If you are asking how the thread pitch motor controller was working I have no in depth knowledge but it would likely be an analog envelope detector. (simple RC filter/integrator would suffice) That would be rectified to make a DC control voltage and the control voltage would be used to modulate the power to the motor in an inverse fashion. ( more audio signal -> less power ) No digits would be harmed in the process. :)

alnwlsn 4mo ago

Do you need to, or only if you care about fitting the longest possible recording on the disk? How much shorter would an LP be if you used a fixed pitch?

picofarad 4mo ago
Well, mindless self indulgence is very loud and aggresive, so an album that is a single CD is 2 vinyls. I'd have to use my usb record player and rip some records and determine loudness vs length to get some baseline, though. Then again, maybe most CD albums are two LPs, I only have a half dozen 2-LP albums, most older stuff is single LP. Is that because albums have gotten longer, or louder? Both?

ghostly_s 4mo ago

I would guess if anyone wants to use this thing it will mostly be for 12" singles, optimal groove packing is not a concern for them.