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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 The floppy drive is obsolete, but the turntable is not, and that got one guy to thinking.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+
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.
...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!
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"
a test tone disc with a track that puts out a steady tone, feed that signal into a computer, run phase lock test or feed a very fine frequency counter. the old way is to superimpose 2 tones into a scope, one from a stable occillator and one from the record, pitch match them,lock the occilloscope and look for wiggles and drift
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.
Not as impressive as the LP Ripper using a scanner.
Philip
Signatures are broken
...to hack a BIOS so that we can starting booting from vinyl.
http://mirrordot.org/stories/e40c721288bda9f3e80e1 d99957ec156/index.html
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.
I sent a complaint to root@localhost just in case.
Just a minute... I have an email...
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.
Linkage!
that part's not working out so well....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
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.
...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.
Floppy the Robot
The biggest problem with "digital sound" is that it enables a huge amount of abuse of the signal and yet make it *apparently* still OK, but on closer listening the flaws become noticeable.
Digital radio, mp3s downloads, digital TV, and all such digital delivery mechanisms have conned the consumer into expecting more choice whilst compression has killed the quality with artifacts - i.e. visible blocking on video, distortion on video.
It's still hard to beat the quality of a quality FM radio receiver tuned to a well-engineered radio station. And for an action movie, artifact free analogue TV is better than most DVDs.
That all said, I think that CD (44.1kHz, 16 bit) is *good enough* for most people. DVD audio, which has higher sampling rates and more bits *should* be better than the theoretical maximum quality of vinyl, subject only to the studio's ability to not ruin the sound.
We had to pull the pages from the web site as the amount of traffic to the site killed it! We are working on just making the article available as a pdf document so everyone can download it... If this site can handle the file then we will be more than happy to make it available.. and then maybe we can get out bandwidth back again!!!! The comments raised on this project have been very interesting, and John will be taking some time out to go through the feedback and reply to you about this project he made. Sorry about this technical fup, stuff will be in place in a few hours. Gordon Keenan
#-#-# http://www.it-reality.co.uk #-#-#
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!
If I sat you in front of my system at home and played a record, and CD of the same recording, you'd think the record was the CD. I've done this nearly 50 times over the last 4 years, and only 3 people have ever guessed correctly.
CDs are only 16bit, and Vinyl has a MUCH higher frequency response range.
Granted, I've got $20K+ into my system, and not everyone has an environment like that, but don't discount a technology because you don't understand it.
My
"... turn that worthless old floppy drive into a most desirable piece of audio gear."
...
It'll play my 8-track tapes??
Oh
Looks like the turntable stopped turning :P
:( How many times do we have to repeat it!)
(use Coral Cache, guys!!!
While working on the Laservision scheme the Philips engineers realized that what they should do instead is completely redesign the system from scratch. They joined up with a group of Sony engineers working on a similar project and the result is known as Compact Disc.
What this guy has done is to turn his floppy drive into (part of) a gramophone. In other words he has turned a recently obsolete technology into an even more obsolete technology.
Vinyl records were a dreadful technology. They scratched, they wore out and the sound from them was distorted in all sorts of ways by the production process. Worst of all they allowed 'audiophiles' an excuse to spend $15,000 plus on equipment and then brag about it at tedious length.
The high end market for audio equipment is essentially a high tech version of the fortune teller industry. The service is essentially a fraud; if there is a difference in sound it is negligible. People pay for it because of the flummery thaqt surrounds it.
This guy has just discovered that you can get a high quality motor for about a buck.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Therefore, analogue is better - scratches and pops and all.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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
One of my treasured posessions is an old external SCSI CD-ROM drive (with a digital audio out) I got it out of the trash at work many years ago. I tell my audiophile friends it's my elite CD transport. It meets all the requirements: it doesn't look like one they've seen before, it doesn't even have a D/A converter, it requires a weird process to load a CD (uses the old CD trays), and, best of all, it has no cue or review buttons, nor does it have a remote. Nothing says audiophile like a bad user interface!
If one of my audiophile buddies doubts I spent $2000 on it, I show him the old SCSI cable I have connected (only on the one end), which is about half an inch thick, and ask him if his connection cable is that good.
I've had more fun with this thing than one man should rightly have. It does a fine job of playing CDs, too - back when CD ROM drives cost $400, they built them solidly - I never did find out why someone threw it away. Hmmm, maybe I should start claiming it uses tubes internally - nothing makes a digital signal sound good like using tubes!
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