Old Floppy Drive Becomes New Turntable

vinyl1 writes "This must be the ultimate in retro-cool hardware hacking. The floppy drive is obsolete, but the turntable is not, and that got one guy to thinking. He provides a full tutorial on how to turn that worthless old floppy drive into a most desirable piece of audio gear."

Comments

Re:That would make one *terrible* turntable

[LardBrattish]

Well according to the article (You did READ the article before sounding off didn't you ;) it's so quiet he couldn't hear the motor in operation and had to add an LED to be sure. The actual turntable is quite cool because it's shaped vaguely like a Fender Stratocaster body with a glass platter.

Re:That would make one *terrible* turntable

[biglig2]

If you RTFA, you'll see that the floppy is being used by a custom hifi shop to build a custom turntable. They're not doing this because they can't afford a turntable, or don't know where to buy one; they're using a floppy drive as a source of parts. The idea being that floppys are actually very sophisticated devices, and are only ridiculously cheap because of the huge economies of scale involved in their manufacture.

Re:cool DIY project, but:

[iainl]

It all depends on what you want the turntable for. Direct Drive is indeed vital if you want the "45rpm, right when I press the button" demands of a DJing deck, but belt drives (that admittedly need occasional recalibration as the belt wears out) usually offer less flutter than similarly specced direct ones.

If you're wanting an audiophile deck for just putting a record on and listening, then you probably don't want DD after all.