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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.
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)
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.
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.
"...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.
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
Does anybody know what sort of bandwidth a record can manage?
An Ortofon DSS731 cutting head has a usable response from 5Hz to 25kHz, but typical playback systems fall short of this.
Telephone lines were never good enough
Telephone lines have a frequency response from 300Hz to 3kHz.
Do records have enough bandwidth that you could coax 128kb/s, or even more, out of a suitably formatted recording using the various modem techniques?
The bit rate of compressed audio isn't directly related to frequency response. A 64kb/s MP3 can reproduce a discrete 20kHz tone, provided no lower frequencies deemed more important by the psychoacoustic processing are present (the "swooshing" from hi-hats on low bit rate MP3s is the encoder deciding you don't need to hear those frequencies).
But to answer the question, a fresh vinyl recording played on a properly balanced tone arm should be indistinguishable from 48kHz uncompressed audio because it's uncompressed audio.
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