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Direct-to-Vinyl Recording Makes a Comeback (Video)
For many decades, gramophone records (the black vinyl discs in Grandma's attic) were made by cutting grooves directly into an acetate disc, then making a mold from that "master" and "pressing records." Nowadays, of course, we use digital recording software on our computers or even on our mobile phones. Vinyl? Strictly for fogies and maybe a few audiophiles who think analog recordings have a depth and warmth that CDs and MP3s lack. Naturally, SXSW is a haven for these folks, and among them Tim Lord found Wesley Wolfe and two German compatriots from vinylrecording.com, busily demonstrating their vinyl recording system, which is sort of the gramophone record equivalent of print on demand. Lots of background music in the video makes the voices a bit hard to hear; some might prefer the transcription -- although those who do will lose out on watching the vinyl recording machine in action. Either way. Or both. Up to you.
Can I listen to it on my mp3 player?
Meow
It's disgusting how so-called 'audiophiles' can bear to listen to music that has been tainted by electricity. Back in my day, we used Edison Cylinders, recorded entirely by the soundwaves emitted by the performance! (It is actually a neat process to watch, a horn concentrates the incoming sound and a sharp stylus attached to the diaphragm cuts the groove in the cylinder, 100% passive, except for the guy who brushes away the wax shavings)
Whoever wrote this needs to ask somebody. DJs having been quietly making dub plates for performances for years and years and years
There was another round of direct-to-disk back in the 70's, and who knows how many others, before and after that.
I bought a Sheffield disk of Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" back in the mid 70's, and there were other disks in their lineup. Here is someone else's on ebay now - http://www.ebay.com/itm/Prokofiev-Romeo-Juliet-Excerpts-LP-Sheffield-Lab-Direct-Disc-Leinsdorf-LAPO-/380457368606
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It's the superior medium for collectors. Some of you collect old game cartridges right? Do they feel good in your hand? Sure they do. I can use an emulator for that.
But I've seen on the net two other organizations, UK and Italy, that produce one-off vinyls. There was also a home vinyl carving station from vestax (vrx 2000) but I guess vynil mastering needs a LOT more care than cd mastering. Unless you like to see needles jumping.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Are generally found to be distortion and a roll off of high frequencies when one bothers to take apart the actual music reproduction.
Some people have become accustomed to these artifacts and so prefer them.
The only real antidote is to go to live music performances to hear what they really sound like.
I'd recommend that for people used to modern pop recordings too. I think many would be shocked to hear what they are missing in the horribly compressed and otherwise doctored up recordings that are sold today.
The old hi-fi systems had superb ESR that rival that of a poorly made PC power supply. Its all a gimmick to sell to the old, rich folks who used to listen to vinyl when they were younger and stoned out of their minds.
As a professional recording, editing and mixing engineer, all I can say is NO THANK YOU.
For those who place a premium on scratchy, error-prone, expensive, one-time and short recordings this might be neat. There are lots of reasons we started using tape in the late 40s and early 50s in the music recording industry, and loads of reasons we're recording digitally now.
Quality, speed, cost. A direct-to-disc recording system ain't it on any of those fronts.
Totally worth doing! Now if only there were some way of playing that analog record with fidelity anything even remotely approaching a dollar store cd player. Even the most expensive record player has measurable wow and flutter, and driving a needle through vinyl grooves immediately degrades the sound. What's the point of this again?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Does this mean that we can usher in a new wave of music piracy? Don't need any MP3s, just distribute the content as 3D printer files and drive up the demand for such devices and filament. :)
Just do what Lisa and I have been doing all the times something like this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi3HdVJUAyA
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A while back I was looking at an advertisement for a medication used to treat people with a bladder problem. In the fine print it said that in clinical trials, 79% of the people who took this medication reported an improvement in their bladder problem, compared to 49% who reported an improvement after taking a placebo. Half the people who took a placebo claimed they got better.
These must be the same people who believe that vinyl LPs " have a depth and warmth that CDs and MP3s lack"
Vinyl remains king in the electronic/hiphop/whatever DJ scene.
Where sound quality is of absolutely no concern.
hey, this guy in germany who sold me this metal box with vacuum tubes sticking out said it would help with my music playback and so far, after buying accessory after accessory I am left with no money...
Its the sound of maybe 5,000 people who actually think this is cool, and the maybe 1/3 of them who would actually buy a record and only half of those would actually listen to it.
This is just some fad being put out in the hopes of playing on nostalgia or perhaps people who would actually think they might be worth money someday and that's it. Its like how some horror movies were put on VHS a couple years and it caused no resurgence, same thing with tapes and a couple releases of sega genesis games put back out. No one cared and they all fizzled before they even launched.
The people who truly have a passion for records do not care about this. Like my best friends uncle, he doesn't care a bit about this or anything released on record. He prefers original records from when they were widely used and his collection is about 3,000+
"...the first Super Mario he had a square nose. That’s what your audio looks like in 16-bit format. What vinyl’s actually doing is stretching those square waves and rounding them out..."
"Well, I have no technical training at all. No mechanical engineering experience."
Yes, and it shows. I wonder if he thinks black and white kinescope recordings from the 50's have more warmth and depth than digital HDTV.
So I can ignore it?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
at playing audio... dat depth and mid-level tone.
See, I'm an audiophile, too, since I can put together words like, hi-fi, depth, tone, nuance, g-chord all in one sentence...
No. Vinyl is no longer king shit of EDM. That would be laptops and CDJs nowadays. Your knowledge is about 10 years out of date. Yes, Hip-Hop and turntablists and the like still like vinyl to some extent, but pretty much ALL mainstream EDM, trance, techno, progressive, dubstep, whatever, uses CDs and laptops.
Welcome to the 21st century.
The current vinyl comeback is cute and I'm happy it might be helping certain record stores/independant artists as those are generally great people and support great communities. On the other hand vinyl sounds awful with even a reasonable setup. Most annoying to me is a lot of content is released as vinyl only, or even LIMITED vinyl release. Nope I always prefer a digital or cd source as I hate wow and flutter and distortion. The community around the vinyl comeback is a bit mad, let's just focus on good content guys.
I'm holding out for 3d printed records.
only ever going to be an approximation of the source.
http://www.lathetrolls.net/
the vinylrecorder have a pretty bad reputation, for shall we say "people skills"
Vinyl remains king in the electronic/hiphop/whatever DJ scene.
Where sound quality is of absolutely no concern.
Not quite. It's really obvious if the instruments (synthesisers etc) are cheap, poor quality ones, and quite common for people to consider how good a venue's sound is before seeing a band/DJ play.
In any case, I've not seen a DJ using a turntable since... ever (~2004)? They use either laptops or CDs. Most electronic bands I see use at least one laptop.
While I too prefer the sound of a vinyl sometimes, he is full of s*it, comparing it to a 16-bit mario game. Someone should introduce him to Nyquist-Shannon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem
One of my favorite albums was recorded "direct to disk", with a vinyl cutting machine recording the performance live, and the band playing each record side straight through in one set. (The album was James Newton Howard and Friends.)
But here's the thing: they also ran a digital recorder, and the CD was made from the clean digital recording. Then they mastered the CD properly, and it's a very nice CD. I don't think it would be improved by a less-clean recording process.
Oh, my. It's been re-issued, with a new master made from the direct to disc vinyl recording! So it looks like Sheffield Labs thinks it is improved by using a less-clean recording process. No thanks, I'll keep my clean digital copy.
There is exactly one good thing about vinyl recordings: they make it impossible to really over-gain the music to where the wave forms are mangled by hard-clipping. But the alternative is to make a digital copy and just, you know, don't over-gain it.
As with tube amplifiers, there is distortion associated with vinyl records that some people like. The solution is to make a digital filter that simulates this distortion. I helped write such a filter, and I actually like using it when I listen to music with headphones. But I don't want this sort of distortion impressed forever upon the music at the time of recording!
We have the technology to just make a clean copy of the artist's performance. Once that is done, the album can be mastered, and remastered. Heck, record it with a clean digital process and then carve it into vinyl if you want to... just keep the clean digital copy around, so that someday you can change your mind and release a version without the analog distortion.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
heh-heh. that was cool
It's really obvious if the instruments (synthesisers etc) are cheap, poor quality ones...
I should say, it's really obvious to me, and others, but certainly a lot of people don't care.
I wear high-ish quality earplugs (£20), and don't take any drugs beyond one or two alcoholic drinks.
This article makes people who listen to vinyl sound pretentious as all get out. I have a decent sized collection of vinyl records that I listen to daily, but that's mainly because I won a pretty sweet turntable and stereo set. MP3 has its place, like in the car and whatnot, but I do enjoy just putting on a record and listening to it from start to finish as well. I also enjoy owning the physical records and going through the case artwork, etc. A couple of my Floyd and Jethro Tull albums have photo books in them. I guess the point is who cares what form your music takes? If you enjoy it, go for it. If not, that's cool too.
Despite the audiophilia-disposition of the video, my personal observation has been that DJs and audiophiles have kept the industry in motion. I personally continue to collect vinyl, because I actively play vinyl. It's a heartache when a venue doesn't have turntables, but I do have Serato to keep me in the game. But I digress. http://blog.dubspot.com/the-resurgence-of-vinyl-continues-in-2012-record-stores-making-a-comeback/ I'd be curious to know what the conversion rate of newbie-djs-with-digital-tools-to-vinyl is. With such ubiquitous technologies for emulating turntables (and jesus poses!), it seems feasible that a wider market share of DJs contributes to vinyl's extended lifespan.
The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls
A forum devoted to record-cutting deviants, renegades, professionals & experimenters.
http://www.lathetrolls.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k58qrcIJiEE
I buy new vinyl, talk to people at the record store every now and then, and worked with a few people to design a tube amp. Not once have I heard anyone use "warmth" or "depth" to describe music on vinyl. Smoother waveforms at high frequencies is the argument generally used in favor of vinyl, even-ordered harmonics is the argument generally used in favor of tubes. You can argue to death over whether or not these things matter or if the benefits outweigh the negatives of both technologies, but stop using the "warmth and depth" strawman argument you read on the internet from a guy who went to a record store with a bunch of PBR guzzling hipsters. I'm sure I could find people who swear 56Kb MP3s sound no different than 192Kb MP3s and make some fine strawman arguments, too.
Hearing the difference between 128 and 164 kbit/s, between Vinyl and
CD, between Klipsch speakers and B&W speakers -- it's all in you mind.
To NOT know is to enjoy unimpeded. So yes, give me vinyl; just don't
tell me.
I wear high-ish quality earplugs (£20), and don't take any drugs beyond one or two alcoholic drinks.
I'd argue that LSD and MD*A (ie, hippie/rave drugs) actually increase one's ability to perceive subtle differences in sound. alcohol, without a doubt, reduces it. Pot is debatable.
Tim: Usually in 2013, you see people going from vinyl to digital formats, here you are doing the opposite, you’ve got a CD player here that’s feeding music over to a vinyl cutting lathe.
Believe what you want about vinyl records, but recording on vinyl something coming out of CD player goes against any logic he could try to follow.
then why do most of them use cdjs now... with flash drives? sure sometimes they break out the vinyl for fun and show, but it is not the dominant media anymore.
I'd argue that LSD and MD*A (ie, hippie/rave drugs) actually increase one's ability to perceive subtle differences in sound. alcohol, without a doubt, reduces it. Pot is debatable.
I'm completely put off by the uncertainty of what I'd be buying, and from watching the people that do take various drugs. I've considered MDMA, but I'm not interested enough to try it. (I don't use caffeine, so a large cola can get me pretty excited...)
Most people at the clubs I go to do amphetamines or ketamine. It seems to make them boring to talk to (too easily distracted, unable to concentrate enough to finish a sentence).
people skills are overrated.. i dont care someone's attitude as long as their facts and conclusions are correct.
"Warmth" and "Depth" are actually known as "distortion".
Electric recording has a harsh sound that can't compare with the human warmth of direct, acoustically-recorded 78-rpm shellac.
Although direct acoustical recording has a peaky response, the peaks occur in just the right places to make the sound richer.
There is no upper frequency cutoff at all. Logically, ultrasonic frequencies must move the recording stylus and make some impression on the disk, an impression that can be heard even if it can't be seen or measured. These homeopathic doeses of ultra-high-frequency sound explain the airy "open" feeling never experienced with vinyl LPs.
A pair of ticks separated by 1800 milliseconds on an LP distract your attention and spoil the sonic experience, but you can listen "through" a steady continuous series of ticks at 767-millisecond intervals on a scratched 78, because due to the endless repetition you can anticipate and ignore them.
Finally, and most important, when you drop a 78 on edge and it instantly shatters into three wedges held together at their points by the label, the sharp pang of sudden loss makes you feel how valuable and precious these disks are, giving you an emotional connection you can never have with unbreakable vinyl.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
TEN YEARS AGO!
This news is about as current as 9/11. Double pressed vinal records have been in my local music store for at least the last 10 years,and I first heard about them at least 15 years ago. Turntables have never stopped being manufactured and there have always been specialist high end audio shops selling them, along with valve amps.
I think people are forgetting that while a newly-pressed vinyl album may _sound_ great on first playback, you're forgetting that being a mechanical storage medium, vinyl records suffer from the following problems:
1. The record and the needle will wear out from physical contact.
2. If the record center hole is not perfectly centered, you get unpleasant "wowing" effect.
3. The surface of a vinyl record scratches rather easily.
4. The signal-to-noise ratio of a vinyl record is about 55-60 db, far below the 90+ db of a Compact Disc.
5. Setting up the tone arm is very finicky, what with correct tonearm placement, proper tracking force and proper anti-skating force.
6. The preamp's phono inputs require a high-gain low-noise amplifier if you're using a moving-coil cartridge.
7. Vinyl records can "warp," which can cause serious tracking problems.
8. You have to deal with turntable rumble, unless the turntable is heavy and driven by a properly-engineered belt-drive system.
To get everything right, the cost of a quality turntable nowadays can run into the _thousands_ of dollars.
It's a pity that a the war between DVD Audio and Sony's Super Audio CD killed any chance of a second-generation optical disc based on DVD technology with vastly higher data sampling rates than Compact Discs. I've listened to a DVD Audio disc and the audio quality is _phenomenal_, especially the crystal-clear treble playing back high notes on a piano, a piccolo or cymbals. And unlike vinyl records, DVD Audio or SACD discs don't suffer from the mechanical playback issues that limit vinyl records.
Seriously. His face. He could play Steve Jobs in a new movie. Too bad he's a total douchebag. And the voice doesn't fit.
Come out to Cambridge/Boston and visit Elements at Phoenix Landing. Longest running DnB night in the US at 15 years nearly. Preferred format by many DJs is still vinyl on 1200s. You can keep your dubstep and prog house.
The fidelity from vinyl is actually quite good, the first time you play it. Fidelity only drops by .5% every time you play a vinyl record. 200 plays before its all hiss, pops and clicks. Like a mad farmer ploughing a field, the stylus is dragged through the groves on the disk. It only changes the recording by a small amount each time, unlike a CD which can be played continuously for 20 years with no measurable loss in quality or fidelity (likewise an mp3 stored on a hard disk or flash drive). There is a lot of noise about vinyl sounding 'warmer' but that's a load of bunk. If you want to listen to rumble and hiss, have fun. I like cd's and mp3's. You can play them till you are tired of them.
Unfortunately even in DNB this is the case. I play strictly vinyl and have a couple hundred DNB plates - however fewer and fewer releases are coming out on wax. I have been purchasing for my new mix and many of the tunes I've been following I have discovered were digital only, or i couldn't find in a main distributor and had to buy through discogs. It varies greatly between labels, and Nu Urban, one of the biggest DnB vinyl distributors just went out of business. The sad fact is that between declining sales and the rising cost of pressing runs, fewer labels are willing to take the risk and put something out on wax - which is too bad because it is definitely the best for spinning - the interface is built right into the medium. If you play dnb please continue to buy vinyl! And Elements is a great night B)
I believe the term "high fidelity" has been removed from the dictionary these days. Listening to MP3 music at high levels through ear buds has probably robbed many ears of any fidelity. Not that MP3 could be deemed to have much fidelity anyway.
Nos Morituri te salutamus
Interesting, I knew about vinyl carvers because I've been doing some research, and they will carve a 7" 45 for about $35 per side from your source original. The reason? I'm not some record collector, but I own a wurlitzer silhouette jukebox from the early 80's, that I bought not working originally planning to make it into a fancy looking mp3 jukebox to go with my myth/nfs system, but in a spot of fixy managed to get it working 100%, and now its just so damn nice I cant bring myself to butcher it.
There IS something different to things on vinyl. While I have a load of mp3's on a share, and probably binned a couple of sacks of cd's from the period, I find myself buying the odd 45 of stuff I like to go in it, unwrapping them, writing the description ticket for the panel and listening to it. In fact its playing now. Maybe the UI is just so easy, just flick a switch and punch a few numbers in on a dedicated and your listening, and the whole watching the carousel loading arm whirling the record round onto the table.
It's hard to explain I guess. Life is too short to spend out on $50 specialist carved discs though.
back before RIAA was a bad thing, they established a plaback curve that was used to maximize record playback based on how responsive vinyl could be....does this need/use that?
for stuff to sell to audiophiles/phools. There is at least one company out there that will record stuff to Edison cylinders for you if you don't mind paying for it.
Like most junk aimed at audio nut community, its market is limited by the exorbitant prices charged and the small number of afflicted who have the means to indulge their disease. This, like so many other audio trinkets and totems, will disappear quietly without anyone noticing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Strictly for fogies and maybe a few audiophiles who think analog recordings have a depth and warmth that CDs and MP3s lack."
What about those of us who realise that there are great recordings from the 40's to 70's that never made it past records? If you restrict your listening to only the latest trend in recording you will miss out on some great music.
Traktor has basically taken over electronic DJing, except for old-skool house guys. Everybody else would rather haul a laptop and a controller on the plane than 10 crates of records.
HipHop still relies on vinyl, but less so for anyone who's not a scratch artist.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."