Homemade vinyl lathe

[pucho812]

https://www.facebook.com/102612563153288/posts/3536912176389959/?vh=e

 

[bluebird]

Wow that's amazing! If any sound can be reproduced with little speaker magnets on the cutter head, I'm blown away, Lol. It wont sound like a hi-fi record though, that's for sure.
The technology that went into making the Neumann SX74 cutting head has mystical status. People have tried to clone it and failed. I'm sure it can be done, but it ain't easy!

 

[Gold]

There is a lot of that type of stuff on Lathe Trolls in the experimenters forum. A bunch of people have built cutter heads from speakers. There is kind of a dividing line between the experimenters who are not trying to build a full frequency range system and the pros who cut master lacquers. There is a lot of interesting engineering in the experimenters forum. There is more talk about lower end lathes like Presto and mono heads than talk about Neumann and Scully/Westrex.

 

[pucho812]

well bruce swedien would say that for his 10th birthday he got A portable vinyl recorder which ha a little mic and you could record with it. played with it for 10 minutes and that was it, he wanted to be a recoding engineer... 

 

[Gold]

That stuff is great. There is only so much time in the day...

 

[bluebird]

Man I should really spend more time on Lathe Trolls. But once I got my VMS66 put together, recapped and calibrated, Its been running like a champ for years now. I marvel at that machine everyday. Its an absolute work of engineering art. For the medium, an aluminum disc with a lacquer coating, you just can't get any more fidelity out of it than they got. They did the absolute most with the technology they had at the time. And without digital computers! Mind blowing. 

I'm sure someone will come up with some new technology, I've heard about laser cutting, 3d printing and the like, but there's a soulfulness in the way that machine cuts those grooves. All the precision parts and heavy solid platter. The machining of each part to amazing tolerances. Brute force, weight, elegance, its all there in that machine. And what a wonderful thing it did for the world.