Slashdot Mirror
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 The floppy drive is obsolete, but the turntable is not, and that got one guy to thinking.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."
No need to mod anything, just get an old 8" floppy drive hook it up to your amp and speakers and pop an EP in it. That leaves you with an inch of headroom. Brings new meaning to the term "scratching" I suppose.
That's probably the most important part of the turntable... seems like you need to rip up another turntable to make this floppy turntable with its unreliable motor...
Doesn't sound like such a good deal!
Daniel
Carpe Diem
The rumble from that stepper motor would be awful. Good turntables go to great lengths to isolate the platter, needle, and arm from extraneous vibration and to smooth out any slight variations in rotational velocity.
Why not simply buy a decent used turntable from eBay? It isn't as if they are all that expensive.
I got two floppy drives and a microphone!
nerdcore rules
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
is a DIY turntable out of a 52xCD reader. Provided your on a sufficient amount of drugs.
\u262D = \u5350
Because he can.
There are some times I wish I had spent a little more time studying electronics than doing other things, and this is definitely one of those times. The most impressive part of the project is the variable resistor that allows him to control turntable speed manually. Unfortunately for me, I haven't got the knowledge, much less the gumption, to figure something like that out on my own.
I don't suppose he tested the torque of the motor to see how quickly he could get the record to playing speed. That's one of the key features that I understand to be important to audiophiles. And for the DJs, I imagine they are interested in what sort of clutch (?) mechanism there is that could help the motor recover from an accidental reversing of direction.
Seriously, I need to go to Barnes & Noble and pick up a book on basic electronics. It's one of those itches that I just haven't had the resources to scratch.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I personally doubt it will work well. Slight, but slow variations in speed are acceptable, but those motors probably generate really fast variations in speed. This should be easy to hear.
If you want to use an obsolete device, take a DVD-drive or something. Their motors should run a lot smoother.
How do you test for it?
Damn, and only three and half years after i threw out my stacks of bad or useless drives, thanks! Well i _do_ still have a dual 3.5"/5.25" drive, but really i only kept it around for novelty value.
...and it should be known by now
...a hack allows you to read obsolete media of one type with obsolete hardware of another type.
Guy needs motor with good bearing, eyes old floppy drives, rips motor out, cleverly reuses motor for turntable.
Hardly a floppy drive hack.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ummm... wouldn't the turntable actually turning be a dead givaway???
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
Use a laser.
I enjoy Vinyl and I love messing around on decks, that project is really great to see, even though the sound quality wouldn't be the best its still something I would like to try on a rainy day!!
The idea of turntables is you get ultimate control over the music, he's taken this idea one step further & built the turntable too!
because a good turntable is now moved throught magnetism, then minimizing time-loss when scratching, avoiding short-life tracking system, etc.
If you buy this can you email it to me? Party Poker Cracked
As someone who's used his share of cheap belt-drive turntables acquired at garage sales (and then rewired), and who has had some experience at spinning platters this project needs:
Direct drive. There's a reason why DD turntables cost more. Those pulleys wear out, they slip, they stretch on start up and oscillate as they balance out. Why bother with a brushless motor if you're slapping it to a rubber band? Why praise the electronic speed control features of the floppy motor when you're wiring it to a system that by design can't regulate it? Give me torque. When I press that "go" button, I want it spinning perfectly at 33, 45 or maybe 78 RPM, now, not a quarter turn from now. I'm sure there's a way to wire a floppy to do just that, so get back at it!
cf. The Hold Steady, "Everyone's a critic and most people are DJs"
Score: 0, Redundant
That's some bitter moderation right there.
I suppose KarmaWhoreExCon should have just written "What's the point?" and gotten himself modded up +5 Insightful.
(908) 542-3588
He's using an old motor AS A MOTOR. My mind is blown. I didn't think such a thing was possible.
Give this man a prize!
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
that beotch will have torque.
or better yet an old winchester hard drive
Not as impressive as the LP Ripper using a scanner.
Philip
Signatures are broken
A lot of computer equipment has useful motors. Printers have fairly precise motors and quite a bit of power for the drum.
Or you could go and buy a good quality stepper motor.
...to hack a BIOS so that we can starting booting from vinyl.
"Access forbidden!
You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 403
www.audioorigami.co.uk
Apache/2.0.46 (White Box)"
04:58:49 CDT
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Obviously the site is /.ed, but mailto root@localhost?
!
If anyone is lining up to question the difficulty, purpose or utility of this hack please consider this against the shelf http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/ 13/0532234&tid=222&tid=184&tid=137 which has been previously posted in this section.
http://mirrordot.org/stories/e40c721288bda9f3e80e1 d99957ec156/index.html
Man, you should have seen me sit on a turnable table as a toddler (so I am told by those in charge then). Sitting down on the farm in 1980, listening to "Zippity do da" and spinnin' 'round and 'round till the day was gone and the storms had petered (out). Maybe that's why I chase tornadoes now...always chasin' after a spin I can never go home to.
I can't see this guys site now but I made a 7 inch floppy disc turntable 2 years ago with an old tape deck head as the stylus. Gutted the 7 inch floppy and mounted it on an old 78 rpm turntable. The big problem was that the tape decks recording/playback head being used as the "stylus" needed lots of weight pressed down on the gutted floppy disk to get it to record any sounds or just to playback. The sounds that came were very poor too. From the topic seems as if he is using the whole floppy drive? Hmmm... Cant figure out how you would do DJ scratching without getting an electrical shock.... Someone msg me when it's un-slashed.
In response to the various posts above re: using a lasoor, digital music & vinyl disappearing:
Vinyl will never go away because analog sound IS better than digital. The best analogy I can think of is a digital watch vs analog watch with a smooth moving second hand. A digital watch usualy has a smallest measurement of 1/100th of a second, a smooth moving second hand has an infinitely small minimum measurement.
However, with a watch you're unlikely to be able to actually read anything smaller than a second (or perhaps 1/2 a second) on the smooth moving second hand... but with music our ears (or at least some peoples ears) can hear a lot more from an analog source than is present in a digital copy... and no I don't mean that crackle you get on bad quality turntables/gramaphones!
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
Any mirrors?
thanks man.
now has anyone mirrored the rest of the pages?
Floppies are very easy to hack into something else due to the easy controls for the step motor. You don't really need to know much electronics -- just TTL. That's the whole point -- most of the electronics are all done for you. A stepper for steering and the spindle motor for drive is enough to make a little robot, for instance.
Recently I made a heliostat from one though the design could use a bit more work.
Lately I've been mulling over the possibility that, since the FM/MFM read heads use a comb frequency around that of an AV IR remote control, it might be possible to get the data read line to activate when hit with a remote, though florescent lights would probably interfere.
Someone had to do it.
I can't rtfa because it's slashdotted however I can talk about motors.
A stepper motor is not per se more prone to vibration than any other kind of motor. The motors found in floppy drives are permanent magnet motors and behave as such. It depends on how you drive the motor. One of my buddies built one of these years ago. He was very fussy about the drive circuitry and had zero problems with motor induced rumble.
You imply that the platter has to be isolated from the motor. Actually, direct drive turntables were the acme of quality.
that part's not working out so well....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
The first prototype lazer turntables appeared in California in the 80s, IIRC. The big record companies refused it for whatever reasons. (Too much invested in CD?) I don't remember much more, but I think it's another example of IP laws getting in the way of progress.
$15,000? It's not that much more complicated than CD mechanics. The original inventor figured the price could drop just like it did with CDs, again, IIRC.
So the site has been /.'ed, have no fear, google's cache is hear: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:qloFh8l4wmsJ: www.audioorigami.co.uk/FloppyProject/FloppyDIYMoto r.htm+&hl=en
Here today, gone tomorrow.
Here's the history and some review. The story on the site hosting that is also interesting.
At any rate, it looks like the guy who produces that laser turntable does so with proper permission from the owner of the original patent.
Google and web archive makes sure we never lose any data at all !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
That's only used for the read head, there's a seperate good quality motor used for spinning the disc.
Put a PIC chip in it
...Lots of complaints about how it ought to be a damned vacuum cleaner motor or something. Wow and flutter, etc... Look. The mass of the "table" part and the LP itself are actually going to work in this thing's favor. The drive itself has very fine scale speed adjustments, but it's going to be applied to such a larger mass that the momentum (okay, the Angular Momentum) of the thing will reduce the motor's input to a gentle urge to speed up or slow down. Relatively, of course; the point is it's not going to whip an LP around like it were the moving part of a floppy, but it'll still get it going nice and quickly (YMMV).
The result will be very smooth, precisely controlled speed.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Unless they're hearing things above 20kHz, they're not hearing any more information from an analog signal than a digital signal. If we sample at twice the bandwidth of our analog signal we can perfectly reconstruct the original according to the Nyquist Theorem. A CD samples at 44.1 kHz which is enough to cover the standard human auditory range. Now maybe some people can detect frequencies higher than 20kHz, enough that the CD's digital signal cannot accurately reproduce the original frequencies above 20kHz for them, but this is a fault of the 44.1 kHz sampling rate, not digital encoding itself. Digital signals sampled at much higher rates do exist and are used today, just not in your standard CD. So when the CD format changes eventually to allow for higher bit rate recordings, unless these people can detect frequencies above 86 kHz, they won't be detecting anything in an analog signal that they can't in a 192 kHz sampled digital signal. Now, just to cover my ass, yes the frequencies above 20 kHz are still present during the recording process and therefore they will add a very slight amount of distortion to the resulting digital signal. HOWEVER notice that any resulting difference between the digital and analog signal is NOT in the form of missing information but rather in very slightly differing information.
The laws of probability forbid it!
Floppy the Robot
Slashdot should be forced to make a copy of the news page they point to and host the page themselves! It's completely useless to bring down a page (or in this case and many other, the webhosts get wise).
USELESS and stupid this is getting.
We're talking about audiophiles here. These people would convince themselves that they can hear a difference in their equipment in Nebraska when I turn my TV in Alaska on because our power grids are connected somewhere in Texas.
For what it's worth, you can have issues with components dirtying up the power supply. I've seen it but not with audio - If you're doing research with a lot of sensitive electronic equipment, you have to isolate the power or you'll get line cycle noise. I had a buddy who couldn't get decent images with an atomic force microscope until after work, because he could turn off all the lights on the whole floor.
In effect, nerve transmission is based on a kind of PCM over a number of channels. Nerve cells fire in roughly binary fashion. The bandwidth available from ear to brain is quite finite. Provided the S/N ratio of the digital signal exceeds a certain value over a certain bandwidth, it is indistinguishable from an analog signal. Indeed it must be, because it is converted into an analog signal in the reproduction chain.
Audiophiles with golden ears? I have yet to see a study which shows how their mechanisms of neural transmission have such a huge increase in bandwidth over the rest of us.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
That would be impressive!
.signature not found
Who ever said the floppy drive was obsolete? Ok, maybe the 360k drives, but 1.44MB is alive and kicking at my place.
You never know when you'll need a boot disk to reinstall Windows (yes, I've heard that they come on bootable CDs now, but I don't believe it).
I've also got a box of about 1500 blank floppies that I got in the mid 90s when they were cool.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Well, I haven't used a turntable for over 10 years, but I have used a floppy drive 2-3 times in the past year. Therefore the obsoleteness quotient of the turntable is much higher in my book. On top of that there are new types of floppy drives that have built-in flash media readers that promise to be far more useful than the plain old flppy drive - I bought one recently and it looks like I might use it 5-6 times a year!
And of course a totally clueless and humorless mod slaps you with an "Overrated" when, as an audiophile who still has plenty of LPs and remembers (barely) the days of the 8" floppy drives, I found it to be quite humorous, particularly the "scratching" comment.
When is Slashdot going to add a litmus test to getting moderation points that if you don't have a sense of humor, you don't qualify to be a moderator?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Me too... Back when AOL actually served a purpose, they actually sent out media you could format and re-use :)
Oh, come on. IMHO, both the floppy drive and the turntable have reached a point of near equal obsolesence. Which one is more useless is a matter of your personal needs and interests.
Since I'm not an audiophile, but I do use computers a lot, floppy drives aren't *completely* useless. If you're messing around a lot with BIOS flashing (I'm not but I was a few months back), then floppy drives suddenly become important again--while it's true that fluffy modern BIOSes can boot off of various not-floppy devices, some BIOSes have a special chunk of barebones, emergency backup code to support automatic reflashing of the BIOS in the event that the main bulk of the BIOS code gets trashed by a bad flash.
Meanwhile, turntable? Analog, scratchy audio, hard to copy, hard to maintain, not size-efficient, who the fuck wants *that*!?
Well, obviously audiophiles do 'cause they apparently have more finely honed ears than I. *shrug* Ok, fine, so for the intersection of persons that love music and also know computers this project could be useful.
But please don't tell me turntables are really important in general and that floppy drives aren't 'cause... it's just not so. Thanks.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
"... turn that worthless old floppy drive into a most desirable piece of audio gear."
...
It'll play my 8-track tapes??
Oh
Don't copy
That floppy
Scriggitty scra-scra-scratch.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
filler:
Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
The Turntable project is down.. Looks like the mass of us at once killed the server.. Slashdotted again :/
Looks like the turntable stopped turning :P
:( How many times do we have to repeat it!)
(use Coral Cache, guys!!!
You were gonna make a copy
Of a game without payin'?
Come on guys...
I thought you knew better!
Don't Copy That Floppy!
.wav: don't copy that floppy
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
but digital is better for sanity's sake. Imagine trying to store your pr0n on vinyl. "Damn. One scratch and that whole Ginger Lynn compilation is fubar..."
It would be nice if there was an analog that was compact, and of course modern digital systems will be the tools used to design and create it: the optical storage device. That's right, light need not be binary. In the future a continuous spectrum usage will allow us to hear all the sneezes, barfing, women tossing bras on stage, children crying, mistuned bass guitars, poorly maintained drums played by drunken idiots, and other goodness we've unfortunately missed out on with modern concert recordings.
Yeah, I certainly miss pops, hiss, static, and all the other nuance of a technology that catches every little tiny thing. Makes it a real challenge to pick out the other nuances I actually do want like the complex cord changes of a four string electric guitar being played in a studio on digital equipment and played back at the concert so the performer can lip synch to it...
But I look at this way. If I can't afford one of those nice vacuum tube audio boards, I can always wait for the next generation of Intel and AMD processors and sooner or later, they'll be as large and glowing with heat. Maybe they'll even be analog. "This processor supposed to hiss and hum like this?"
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I was flabbergasted at the sound levels I had to endure at a John Hiatt concert I attended in the Chataqua auditorium in Boulder, Colorado, last Wednesday. I didn't have a sound meter with me, but from a near center seat about 8 rows from the front, I'm pretty sure I was enduring 110-120dB. At least it was pretty near the threshold of pain for my ears. Not sure I can even imagine what the levels would be for, say, a Wilco concert.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Once a friend/roomate and I attatched an old record (It was an old Monkeys album), that we bought at a pawn shop for this very experiment, to a Dremel. We lived on a second floor of a three story apartment complex and had a balcony. We thought it a good idea to extend the dremel/record combo out over the balcony and make sure that the record was spinning in a parallel direction to our bodies to keep personal bodily harm to a minimum. We flipped it on one setting at a time slowly clicking to the next speed. She started spinning rather nicely. I don't remember where the setting was on the dremel when the record finally flew apart, but it sure came apart with a magnificent Cr-Cr-Cr-CRACK! Vinyl shrapnel went flying everywhere! We found broken pieces of the record near the swimming pool which happened to be about 150 yards away. It was an interesting experiment. We repeated with AOL discs and a few other CD's that came in the mail, but nothing was quite as spectacular as the record. It also turned out that a few of the pieces that struck the ground directly underneath our experiment had lodged themselves into the ground pretty well. Some pieces almost a full inch. Kind dangerous I guess looking back on it, but fun all the same.
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
I don't care about cd-quality music. First off, human ears do not respond or pick up frequencies higher than about 16-25 KHz. When you're younger, you *MIGHT* (I tested as required by the Plano Independent School System, I was able to hear 32,000 Hz tones) but as you get older it only deteriorates. Why do I care about 44,100 Hz clarity when my ears now (last ear check, could only pick up 23KHz, big drop in what I could hear) are just barely able to pick up on about half the range the CD claims to have?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Most workplaces where a lot of slashdot readers read their news from have now blocked nyud.net as a proxy/anonymizer. Worked great for a while, but sadly it's now dead.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I have a couple of read-only DVD drives sitting around. I think I'm going to turn one of them into a zoescope.
Therefore, analogue is better - scratches and pops and all.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
because a good turntable is now moved throught magnetism, then minimizing time-loss when scratching, avoiding short-life tracking system, etc.
...and electric motors are moved with maaaaagic
Apache should come with a "bandwidth quota deadman's switch" that senses a spike in demand that threatens to exhaust its bandwidth (throughput or quota), then 1> populates a coral (or other) cache, and 2> issues redirect HTTP headers translating incoming requests to the cache. Such a failsafe would be even better if it included caching for other servers, and an inter-Apache protocol to notify the "REFERER" server that it should instead use the REFERER's caching, or an alternate. Such a distributed "server P2P" network would make the Web much more immune to the Slashdot effect.
--
make install -not war
thank you to everyone that could see something nice in my work as was said by someone ...i made it Because i wanted to make something TOTALLY new out of the old....
it took a very long time to get perfection from my idea...but its working great now and looks fantastic
the spec of the units making up the turntable is very high- massive high tolerance main bearing ,thick 30mm clear perpex platter and a 30 mm solid ash plinth -all rubber mounted on cone shape feet...last and not least a excellent brushles motor... why not build 1 yourself and find out?
best wishes
johnnie7
you are one of those annoying uber-l33t audiophiles who thinks the sound of hissing and popping adds "warmth" to music tracks.
read the FLOPPY article.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
can it scratch Linux?
Last Post!
(Shooting from the hip again, so if you really want to know, you should probably hit the search engines.)
Videodisks use a completely different tracking mechanism. Actually, there were two, as I recall, one of which was physical. Neither is compatible with audio on vinyl. There was not much to be backward compatible with, so the whole thing was much simpler for video.
The machines that cut audio in vinyl vary so widely that the tracking mechanism has to be extremely intelligent. That's the reason for five lasers, and a big part of the excuse for the price tag until this becomes popular enough for mass production. And irregular color in the vinyl messes the tracking lasers up still, according to the reviews. (I'm wondering why they don't have custom multi-color+UV LED lasers built for the tracking.)
Vinyl could be pretty lousy, and it often was. The recording industry has always complained about pirates and warned about the poor quality, but they've been great for cutting corners, too.
CDs are one prime example of corner-cutting. Vinyl has dropoff in both amplitude resolution and high-frequency sensitivity, but CD just completely clips everything over the edge.
The nice thing about CDs is that they are better than AM broadcast and competitive with FM, and the digital nature allows delaying the noisy elements down to the final output amplifier stages, so it sounds noiseless.
Also, most people find the high frequencies to be more distracting than interesting, so the sudden chop at 22KHz (oversampled to fake 44Khz) actually sounds "better" to the casual listener who really isn't interested in telling a flute from a fife.
To truly maintain flat reproduction, you need more than 16 bits of resolution in amplitude, and you need 120K sampling rates or better. (I worked the math out in college, while taking an acoustical physics class twenty or so years ago.)
From the reviews of the current models of these laser turntables for vinyl, I'm thinking they need a number of improvements. For the dust, I'd juggest employing a built in cleaning system to pre-clean the disk before playing, and air filtration like removable hard disks have. Variable color and possibly variable angle tracking lasers should help on issues with the color of the vinyl.
But I think it's really important to be able to profile a disk, to compensate for the cutting and press machinery and for the wear and tear the disk has suffered. Not just moving the laser up and down in the groove, but to be able to customize the response curves for various frequencies. That would probably take a little human interaction on the user's part.
None of this, of course, has much to do with using a floppy motor for a turntable motor.
... I surely do miss a lot of interesting stuff!
Just because belt-drive TTs can be used for slipcueing, doesn't mean they're well-sutited for it.
And to another comment above, I own a 15-year-old consumer-level Technics direct-drive turntable, it retailed ~$120USD. Many were direct drive.
And yes to the comment below, for audiophile systems, belt drives MAY even be superior (I'll guess because of less noise transmitted over the belt).
^^
Um... *scratches head* First you say that only a very few people were able to tell the difference between the CD and the record. So? This is only telling me that the record is equally good (not better) than the CD. Then you say that Vinyl has a "MUCH higher frequence response range". But if the average listener can't tell the difference between that and a CD, what's the fucking point? Lastly you admit that this oh-so-awesome quality system (that apparenlty only sounds equally good to (not better than) CDs to most humans) set you back $20+.
By your words, you have effectively labeled yourself an "audiophile" and, if you go back and re-read my original comment, I think you'll read me writing that, for you... for just you and others like you, the turntable is not obsolete.
But see then there's people like me and all those poor people you subjected to the "hey, guys! listen to this!" test. I think the rest of us will get by just fine with our CD (and even M-P-3 gasp! lossy compression! horror of horrors!) players. Thanks.
(P.S. the above is not intended to be a rant or to be inflammatory--I'm just going overboard to try to remake my original point: which was just that YMMV and what might be obsolete for the general public will probably never be obsolete for a select few. I'm not part of that select few when it comes to turntables, but for the time being, I am when it comes to floppy drives.)
Furry cows moo and decompress.