MakerBot Introduces Printable Vinyl Records

An anonymous reader points out great news for audiophiles soundsnobs musicians zombies , hackers, and anybody who's tired of having to pay for physical music media. MakerBot Industries has now demonstrated the capability of the MakerBot to print out listen-able vinyl records of your favorite tunes. With a microphone webcam pacemaker PDF attachment, it can even record new audio in real-time. "Using the MakerBot Generation 4 Electronics microstepping capacity, the AudioNozzle modulates the amount of plastic deposited too to two tu create a high-fidelity waveform. The results often surpass the dynamic range of 24 48 96 pi -bit recordings and can contain frequencies up to 57khz — even higher than the Nyquil Nyquist Dayquil Triamenic frequency for 96khz digital recording."

Comments

The day that children run the internet

[RapmasterT]

I've made a point of saying this every year. If you want to go wild with fake news stories on April 1, that's fine...but don't expect anyone to take you seriously the other 364 days of the year. The fake stuff doesn't go away you know...do I really have to tell people this? It's out there FOREVER..you will FOREVER be attached to FAKE news stories, even on days when it's not April 1st.

Grow up...or don't...but don't complain when people want mature sources and go elsewhere.

Re:actually, I wanted to read real news

[blair1q]

But we now know what they've been doing with their UI budget instead of fixing the fucking thing.

If you're tempted to do a 4/1 joke, remember this:

[RevWaldo]

"If you don't have a sense of humor, don't try to be funny."

- Pope David Meyer, Church of the SubGenius

.

Re:If only it were true!

[_0xd0ad]

I can't imagine any real way of printing the grooves.

You wouldn't print the groove, you'd print up the surface on either side of it with a 3D printer. The 3D printer would have to be very fast and accurate to print in real-time, obviously.

Also, making a master (negative) with a 3D printer might be easier and more practical than directly making a vinyl disk with one (for one thing, it'd only have to print a single ridge as it traveled around, instead of two with a groove between them). The master could then be used to stamp vinyl copies. If a relatively cheap 3D printer was capable of producing a master, it might be cheaper and more practical than the current methods of making a master.

Re:A word about Vinyl

[antispam_ben]

It's true most audiophiles have little technical knowledge, and they have little or no clue why they like the LP sound. and likewise for the younger crowd rediscovering "vinyls." LP's (vacuum-cleaned and played with a good cartridge and turntable) are at least as good as music played back with lossy encoding through portable players, the way most people listen to music thesedays (this psychoacoustic data compression should not be confused with the topic I address below, dynamic range compression).The quality of recordings has less to do with the medium and more to do with how music production and mastering have changed over the decades.

The RIAA EQ has nothing to do with the sound (other than appropriately shaping the max signal at different frequencies and the S/N ratio). Tape (in use for many decades, still used for some recordings) has recording and playback EQ as well, and for similar reasons.

The stereo compromise for LP's (this is actually where the term mastering originated) is mainly making the bass mono, which was done anyway for pop record starting in the late '60's with the bass guitar and kick drum mixed "in the middle" for maximum power through both stereo speakers. LP's are also made with a dropoff below 40 Hz to keep from exciting the stylus suspension/arm resonance, but very little pop music (as performed live and recorded on CD's) has anything below 40Hz either. The lowest note on the common 4-string bass guitar, the E, is 41Hz.

The REAL compression started in the '80's and became extreme in the '90's with hypercompression, the "LOUDNESS WARS" and actual signal clipping on CD. That, perhaps more than anything else, is why many people like the sound of LP's - despite its limitations, the recordings made on records have more dynamics than on modern CD's. One CD held as the epitome of this production technique was Rush's Vapor Trails: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapor_Trails

It's such an irony. When CD's were announced it was touted as such a great innovation, recordings would have greatly increased dynamic range over LP's, and certainly the potential was there, but the exact opposite happened.