personal Vinyl cutter : phonocut

[nashkato]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/phonocut/phonocut-home-vinyl-recorder/faqs
what do you guys think ?
10-15 minutes per side on 10"
stereo 1/8" unsymetrical input

 

[gyraf]

no way it's going to be decent quality sound.

there's a reason the cutting lathes were so expensive.

/Jakob E.

 

[bluebird]

I saw that! I'm excited because now I can work from home 8)

 

[Tubetec]

I think theres been a few commercial attempts at this idea before ,
I forget which company it was now but back in the early 2000's one of the bigger Dj electronics companies
had a mini lathe for sale , maybe it was Numark ,Stanton or Vestax I cant remember which .
It basically worked as spec'd ,even though spec was a fair bit below what a proper vinyl pressing company could achieve , it was still handy for DJ's to print their own material to wax and bring out to clubs .

Is that 398 dollars he has pledged or 398,000 

 

[mjrippe]

The comparison clip had several seconds of the original recording and pro lathe cut followed by two seconds of their machine.  I wonder why?  The voice recording had obvious distortion.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I usually irritate people when I say what I think about vinyl, but indeed this is unlikely to accidentally work better than existing technology.

It would be interesting if they did come up with something that didn't totally suck, and surprising too.

JR

 

[pucho812]

there where guys at Namm with something similar

here is their website and still their unit is desktop friendly...


https://www.vinylrecorder.com/

 

[abbey road d enfer]

I usually irritate people when I say what I think about vinyl, but indeed this is unlikely to accidentally work better than existing technology.

It would be interesting if they did come up with something that didn't totally suck, and surprising too.

JR

Since statistically 75% of the newly bought vinyl discs end up not being played, who cares about sound quality?

 

[Winston OBoogie]

There was a time when I preferred original pressings of old classic albums over some of the dubious CD re-releases that were churned out in the beginning.
I think we have good re-mastered versions of the usual suspects these days so I'm happy playing from digital. 

Comparing an old, original, 1st generation master tape directly to a top-end converter generated file can sometimes leave me feeling something was lost though.
Off topic a bit I know, soz.

 

[JohnRoberts]

There was a time when I preferred original pressings of old classic albums over some of the dubious CD re-releases that were churned out in the beginning.
I think we have good re-mastered versions of the usual suspects these days so I'm happy playing from digital. 

Comparing an old, original, 1st generation master tape directly to a top-end converter generated file can sometimes leave me feeling something was lost though.
Off topic a bit I know, soz.

I wrote about this in the 80s. In the early days of digital they tried to print master tapes to digital media without "sweetening" (post processing to compensate for vinyl losses). However many master tapes were already mastered with the HF hot to survive the losses from vinyl processing. Printing a HF hot master tape flat, ended up way too hot, too much of a good thing.  :

I worried for a while that I might not find digital versions of obscure recordings, but so far I have found digital versions of every one of my old albums that are too trashed to play with a needle.

JR

 

[Tubetec]

I do remember in particular Polydor's earlier CD reissues of classic albums were a crock of shite ,not only that but the error rate on the disks continued to worsen over time as the top surface laquer wasnt right and the aluminium oxidised, typically in more modern times the top layer of disks in painted to provide protection , The original Live at Leeds cd was one that wasnt properly mastered for years , eventually polydor  reissued it with additional bonus tracks . Hendrix cds under that same  label were rubbish too for years ,until they finally went back a did the job over . 

Dont the pros in vinyl cutting use something like 50 w/ch to the cutter heads , and use really specialised EQ's ,
Maybe theres a chance in the modern era to use dsp processing to simplify the equipment .

Vestax VRX2000 , that was the machine I was thinking of .  Looks nice ,but Im not sure about availabillity of blank disks ,its also rare as it wasnt in production for long .

 

[abbey road d enfer]

Dont the pros in vinyl cutting use something like 50 w/ch to the cutter heads , and use really specialised EQ's ,

IIRC, the amps in the SAL74 claimed 700W peak power.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I do remember in particular Polydor's earlier CD reissues of classic albums were a crock of sh*te ,not only that but the error rate on the disks continued to worsen over time as the top surface laquer wasnt right and the aluminium oxidised, typically in more modern times the top layer of disks in painted to provide protection , The original Live at Leeds cd was one that wasnt properly mastered for years , eventually polydor  reissued it with additional bonus tracks . Hendrix cds under that same  label were rubbish too for years ,until they finally went back a did the job over . 

yup... As an early defender of digital I had to deal with audiophools who considered the digital technology tragically flawed.. Some probably still do.  : Early digital was far from perfect but generally an improvement over typical consumer playback of the day.

In addition to a mastering step where an engineer tweaked the master for the vinyl process, there was a "sweetening" step to review and tweak flawed mixes. So two sets of experienced ears before release to correct/improve the raw product.

The double edged sword of digital media is that you can print your mix without these additional review steps (for better and worse).

Dont the pros in vinyl cutting use something like 50 w/ch to the cutter heads , and use really specialised EQ's ,
Maybe theres a chance in the modern era to use dsp processing to simplify the equipment .

Vestax VRX2000 , that was the machine I was thinking of .  Looks nice ,but Im not sure about availabillity of blank disks ,its also rare as it wasnt in production for long .

Of course it is possible to improve the vinyl process. How good it could ever get stands to be seen.

JR

PS: My dad was a recording engineer way back when... we had an old Western Electric amplifier from the 1930s in our basement. I estimate it was no more than a couple tens of watts. I speculate it was an old cutting amp, since audio playback amplifiers were generally lower power than that.  That old WE amp filled up a 19" rack to maybe 4' tall. My dad was using it to drive the one loud speaker in our living room. That basement amp was upgraded/replaced by a RCA consumer (tube) amp in the early 50s  that was shoe box sized and fit in the living room next to the record player.

 

[Winston OBoogie]

There's no doubt that a lot of early CD releases of Zeppelin, Hendrix, Who, et al.  were quite crap.  It also seemed to coincide with the trend of removing tone controls on pre/power amps which, with a slight tweak, could have improved things somewhat.

I don't own any physical media these days, everything I want to listen to is on a hard drive server.  I do miss the packaging and experience of buying and opening a new album, especially the vinyl gatefold sleeves. The whole thing was more immersive.

John, your dad's 1930's Western Electric amp from the basement would probably realise a few $K these days if you'd thought to rescue it 

 

[JohnRoberts]

There's no doubt that a lot of early CD releases of Zeppelin, Hendrix, Who, et al.  were quite crap.  It also seemed to coincide with the trend of removing tone controls on pre/power amps which, with a slight tweak, could have improved things somewhat.

I don't own any physical media these days, everything I want to listen to is on a hard drive server.  I do miss the packaging and experience of buying and opening a new album, especially the vinyl gatefold sleeves. The whole thing was more immersive.

John, your dad's 1930's Western Electric amp from the basement would probably realise a few $K these days if you'd thought to rescue it 

I turned the two foot tall power supply section into a DIY 4x200W audio amp back in the early 70s. The DIY amp design borrowed liberally from popular amps of the time (BGW, Flame Linear, etc. but was not a direct copy of anything.) The power transformer weighs 65# by itself.  I repurposed the 3 position power switch to provide an inrush series power resistor to reduce current surges from initial turn on, the second on position shorts out the series resistor and connects the speaker relays for popless turn on/off. 

I think I still have one of the three WE sections sitting out in my laundry/tool room. In my judgement it isn't worth the cost to ship it.  The now missing third section probably got dragged to my street for junk day some time ago... Remarkable that I moved the junk around the country with me for decades. I'm sure it is missing any valuable rare parts. As I recall it had some odd mechanical design features related to isolating the amplifier tubes. The power supply section had 4 huge rectifier tubes mounted through the front panel.

Since I am now in the mode of throwing away rather than accumulating junk this too will go.

I now have 6 channels of class D (Hypex) amps for my living room system.  Technology is good.

JR

 

[Gold]

This machine is a home recorder more akin to a ‘dub plate cutter’ like a Presto or Rek-O-Kut than a professional machine like a Neumann or Scully. As I understand it it has DSP so it’s difficult to blow up the cutter-head

The peak power of the SAL rack is 600W.  The way to measure power as related to audio is joules over time. Only high frequency requires power. A 1K sine wave would draw less than 1W.  Peak power is needed for clean reproduction of transients. In the days of tape and transformers this was more important than in the era of poorly implemented GBW IC’s and tizzy Chinese mic’s.

 

[gyraf]

..tizzy is a good word..

 

[abbey road d enfer]

what do you guys think ?
10-15 minutes per side on 10"

It's a somewhat unusual format, but who wants LP's today? I guess DJ's are perfectly happy with this format. They say they're working on a 45rpm version; there would be a market for juke-box fans.

stereo 1/8" unsymetrical input 

  It's a tad annoying for pro audio people, but perfectly hip for i-phone freaks.


My major concern is they have no built-in aspiration; for demos, it seems they use a standard vacuum cleaner. It's too bad, because their claim of fully automatic operation falls down on that point. Indeed full microprocessor control should make disc-cutting a routine task, eliminating human decisions about manipulation of the cutter controls, which, ever since, have been a large part of the art.

 

[PRR]

> aspiration

The "portable"(hah) cutter I had used no sucker. A camel hair brush and an oversize spindle wrapped-up the swarf.

 

[Winston OBoogie]

For sh*ts and giggles I went over to a mate's house and listened to a few tracks from a couple of albums I played on in the late '80's that were released on vinyl.  All analogue recordings.
Granted these were for Atlantic Records with biggish budgets and were mastered by Bob Ludwig.  Even though the vinyl is obviously technically inferior in lots of ways, it sounded very close to how I remembered things.  I couldn't say the same for a CD copy I compared one of them to.    This is a fairly recent digital transfer/re-mastering job that was done but, honestly, the only digital copy I think I liked is one I did myself from the vinyl through a decent phono pre amp and converter about 25 years ago.

Naturally, none of this relates to this new Rek-O-Kut which won't have a magic Bob Ludwig preset, but it did surprise me how much more I preferred the experience of the ancient technology.