APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

https://teenage.engineering/products/apc-2

by vthommeret • 1 month ago

266 184 1 month ago

Arainach2• 1 month ago

Not even a price listed. I don't understand the market for this - fancy musical instruments for creativity, sure, there's a market, but who wants to own cutting vinyl? How many records would you need to make for this to be more economical than paying a dedicated shop? How many would you need to do to "achieve higher quality"? How consistent are your results?

jagged-chisel• 1 month ago

These are Designed. The target audience has tremendous disposable income, and Taste (subjectively, of course.)

No one is buying this for economy’s sake.

onlypassingthru• 1 month ago

Are there bootlegs on vinyl? Maybe now there can be.

actionfromafar2• 1 month ago

Isn't a vinyl cutter the first step when pressing records?

fileoffset• 1 month ago

yes there is, I bought one by accident the other day

klodolph3• 1 month ago

Teenage Engineering seems to run partly on hype and halo effect. It makes cool things you can’t afford, and you buy something cheaper. Selling a vinyl cutting machine keeps them in the news, which keeps them in your mind, and then you think about how you always wanted an OP-1 but oh maybe you could buy the EP-133 instead.

I’m sure there’s a price at which the vinyl cutter is profitable.

darnfish• 1 month ago

It's also possible that TE are full of people who are passionate about design and sound and want to work on and release interesting products in that space. Not everything is a psyop

mieses2• 1 month ago

They make cool stuff but it's performance art. They're not a serious product company.

tonypapousek• 1 month ago

There’s certainly novelty to this, I’d love one if the price were reasonable. Direct capture, almost like a polaroid for vinyl records, no need to “develop” it.

I imagine artists could sell a super-limited (i.e. 1 copy) live recording of a show the second it ends for a premium, especially if they kept the machine on stage and personally packaged and signed it.

pembrook• 1 month ago

Sir, I commend you for your lack of taste for aesthetics, "coolness", and for maintaining the cynical, pessimistic Hackernews status quo.

I've been worried this place has gotten eternal september'd full of redditors, AI bots, and low-IQ emotional mainstream political rants.

But then you swoop in here and remind me that it's still 2007 in Hackernews land: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Never change.

nine_k• 1 month ago

To me, "cool" is a slightly derogatory term when applied to design. It usually means that smoke and mirrors play a significant role.

Waterluvian• 1 month ago

I have a real “I was born yesterday” feeling having realized that “Teenage Engineering” has nothing to do with making audio tech accessible to young newcomers.

fragmede5• 1 month ago

rich young newcomers are totally welcome!

Lio2• 1 month ago

Is that entirely fair?

Their Pocket Operators are pretty cheap and accessible.

rtpg3• 1 month ago

This isn't that but their "record factory" toy[0]... I'm like 90% sure is the same thing as something Gakken released in Japan for half the price as a little fun toy[1]

Even in the age of the internet there's a huge business in people basically taking a "normal" thing from another market and then rebadging it to release as an elevated thing.

Studio neat has a $231 tiny box cutter[2]. OLFA (A "professional" box cutter maker) sells a 2 pack of tiny box cutters that probably are 5x more ergonomic on account of being made to be used instead of to look nice on a website, for $10. [3]

The best version of a thing is likely whatever people who do it all day use. But you can totally make a market for consumers who want "fashionable" things but who don't really get the space.

Studio Neat is a big offender on this honestly... basically all of their stuff have "better" things at least at half the cost just available in random stationary stores. I'm all for wasting money on pens, but at least waste them on good pens!

[0] https://teenage.engineering/products/po-80

[1] https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200

[2] https://www.studioneat.com/products/keen

[3] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/OLFA-Compact-Knife-Pieces-95B2...

11235813212• 1 month ago

That fancy box cutter looks high utility; what don't you like about it besides the price? The retraction seems designed for frequently opening boxes, but not constantly. (I open few boxes and have a bog standard box cutter; I haven't used Studio Neat's or OLFA.)

sandcat_2• 1 month ago

That used to be $95 at launch, which still is very expensive of course, but slightly more palatable. I wonder if the current price is due to tariffs perhaps?

lucaspiller• 1 month ago

The best box cutter is the Moby Safety Knife. I used it when I was working in a supermarket 20 years ago, and I haven't found anything even remotely comparable.

The short blade on top is perfect for breaking the tape to open the box without damaging the contents. Then the mouth can be used for quickly breaking down boxes or cutting shrink wrap. You are just cutting tape, so the blade never wears out.

I cringe every time I see someone using a Stanley knife in a supermarket.

https://www.safeknife.com/

cmrdporcupine3• 1 month ago

Back when I DJ'd techno in the 90s I would have killed for this for what it could bring creatively to a set. Just the ability to cut my own tracks onto white labels and put custom loops etc on vinyl would have really changed things entirely without having to front a whole bunch of cash (which I def did not have) to get a batch of records pressed which probably nobody else would order or play.

But now mixing is done digitally and playing with vinyl is a mostly lost art and it's trivial to put your own material together into audio files and mix it.

dylan6043• 1 month ago

I've heard tales of Ritchie Hawtin playing multiple turntables (6-8 depending on who's telling) where he'd have tracks separated as stems into dub plates and do live remixes by swapping out the plates. The things people did before Ableton!

colechristensen• 1 month ago

Market: music industry veterans that won the race and have boutique record labels for small runs of obscure or promotional or small bands. Have five records printed for the merch table and the next show. Once you have the machine hopefully the marginal cost of a record would make sense for extremely small runs.

Where a band with no money might struggle to afford a $1000 minimum run somewhere else, they might be able to make beer money at a show with records made on one of these. Probably not "economical" in the machine may never pay for itself, but somebody rich buying one as a mechanism to promote musicians on a small scale probably makes sense to them.

Brian_K_White• 1 month ago

I would buy a machine that makes new floppy disk media if it existed, and not because of any economical argument.

I would buy a machine that makes new laserdiscs if it existed, and not because of any economical argument.

... aluminized paper for electric arc printers

... wax film thermal print head ribbon

... a re-inker for cloth typewriter ribbon (at least this one is straightforward to design and build myself some day)

... extra wide cloth matrix printer ribbon with 4 colors

... 1.9mm magnetic tape for exatron wafers

A record cutter has way more potential audience than any of those. They will sell every one they can even manage to make.

thenthenthen2• 1 month ago

There is one company that sells similar lathe cutters in Europe. To aquire it you need to go on a multi day training in a remote Swiss forest. Then it’s around 10.000 EUR in equipment, granted you supply your own record player (sl1200 ~700EUR). But yeah cutting high quality stereo records is an art. No matter the money you throw at it, it will involve a lot of maintenance, skill, experience, spare parts, mastering skills, consumables, and time (these cut in real time). Indeed, who wants to do that? I welcome any effort in this niche though!

thenthenthen2• 1 month ago

Consistency is super hard to achieve if you are not cutting daily in a (climate) controlled environment, even then, you will burn out the cutting head transducers, your cutting heads will dull (super fast). Operational costs are pretty high. Wonder how much they will charge for this lathe. I guess 40-80k USD?

dylan6043• 1 month ago

Might I introduce you to the concept of dub plates? I absolutely love playing vinyl as a dj, and being able to cut my own would be worth it to me. Some people are just silly about their hobbies even without going into lalaland like an audiophile. Growing up, my dad had an 8-track recorder and a box of blank cassettes. I would record my music to them as the car I drove still had an 8-track player. It's goofy. It's fun. It's not logical per se, but it's also not hurting you. So leave me to my idiosyncrasies and go back to your Spotify feed and obey and consume as you do

pstuart• 1 month ago

Nor any clue on what blanks cost. But I could see the thrill of this if money was no object.

phodo• 1 month ago

> "who wants to own cutting vinyl?"

Well, Sega gamers for one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c744iD0_fWU

enoeht• 1 month ago

they list them too https://teenage.engineering/retailers

picofarad3• 1 month ago

There was software distributed by radio and vinyl i believe, which means my query if minidisc could be used was a silly one (in lieu of a tape drive, not for Sega!)

CyberDildonics• 1 month ago

Maybe a party novelty for hipsters.

This stuff is like expensive watches. If there was no one to show it off to there would be no one who would buy it.

dhosek3• 1 month ago

There used to be places where you could make your own one-of-a-kind record: pretty much direct microphone to vinyl¹ which I’m guessing this essentially is. But that said, I kind of feel like most of Teenage Engineering is more stunt than practical.

⸻

1. A booth for making records like this plays a role in the plot of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Elvis Presley’s very first recordings were a similar thing, the two sides recorded in a booth to make a singular record to give his mother as a present in 1953.

TylerE2• 1 month ago

Producing a lathe cut is the first (physical) step of many of pressing vinyl.

This isn’t targeting consumers, or even record stores, but record pressing plants.

This is kind of a big deal because this sort of fundamental equipment hasn’t been available new for decades. The vast majority of plants/mastering facilities are using old Scully lathes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Those are getting ever older and harder to source parts for, and with the vinyl boom the number of pressing plants is actually going up.

atoav• 1 month ago

Teenage Engineering has the market of people who have a lot of money to spend on a hobby, want a fancy product design and don't care about cost.

The exception is their PO series stuff which is actually kind of affordable for what you can get out of them.

gizajob3• 1 month ago

Vinylrecorder.com

There’s been a market for this for nearly 30 years (and the rest).

protocolture• 1 month ago

Every Teenage Engineering Product:

Damn I would buy this for 50 bucks.

I actually have a project that requires a bunch of custom vinyl, but I am guessing this is not economical.

navaed01• 1 month ago

In a world of digital rationality, I’m glad teenage engineering are here to design the absurd and analog. It doesn’t make rational sense - and I think that’s the point

Triphibian• 1 month ago

Sometimes it is nice to have one thing that does its one job extremely well.

stigz• 1 month ago

Price? If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

PCI-eX16• 1 month ago

our shared vision is to enable access to anyone who wants their music or sound on a physical record.

FWIW, You can get 100 records + jackets printed professionally for ~$10 a pop.

Gakken toy record cutter is low quality, but costs $160.

I wonder what this would cost. Surely it's impractical for personal use, as marketed.

rtpg3• 1 month ago

The Gakken toy record cutter was only 8000 yen when it was released[0].

My spouse bought one on a whim. The quality is ... quite bad. It's a tool for learning about how this works though! So it was a fun little activity. But it really is "just" what it is.

Maybe Teenage Engineering's toy that looks like is exactly the same tech is better. I have my doubts.

[0] https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200

emj• 1 month ago

The two groove cutters(?) on the APC-2 look like the weigh more than that toy cutter. It is interesting that this prints in realtime is that a toy thing?

handspun• 1 month ago

Shipping is making things prohibitively expensive in many parts of the world

whywhywhywhy2• 1 month ago

Yeah that copy doesn’t line up with the reality of the pricing or production run of this thing at all.

Cool project but the opposite of democratization.

georgelyon• 1 month ago

Cool, but can it make parallel grooves like HENGE’s Journey to Voltus B?

https://www.outofrage.net/post/review-henge-journey-to-voltu...

vr463• 1 month ago

I looked and went, "WTF is that? Looks like a record cutting machine"

Scrolled down

WTAF

I'm a total TE fanboi, I have the OP1F and OP-XY, they're everything I ever wanted and my MPC and Digitakt haven't be touched in months. And the Digitone Keys is unplugged propped against the bookshelf. It's extraordinary how addictive these two little synths are for making things happen.

The APC-2, however, is a fascinating outcome of what happens when you have a bunch of creative people who like - and can - do things that are new to them and make them new to others. It's no wonder they keep getting asked to do cool stuff like Panic's Playdate, Baidu's Raven, Nothing Smartphones and Headphones.

TE have retained this incredible playful vibe that has long drained from Sony and Apple.

I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.

"God, I'm good," thought the Rolex wearer as he glanced at his wrist.

Hipsters will buy anything that looks cool. But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.

alexjplant• 1 month ago

I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.

Nobody pretends that high-end watches are anything besides objets d'art and even then not every watch is a Rolex synonymous with conspicuous consumption. TE, on the other hand, has legions of fans that buy this stuff without knowing the first thing about music production just because they think it's cool and want to try it out. Nobody who buys a $700 Tissot thinks it tells better time than a $17 Casio.

I have no problem with any of this. The world needs more aspiring creatives and it's none of my business how these consumers choose to spend their money. The fact that you find it appropriate to unilaterally shit on people who have nice watches while being in possession of a $2000 groovebox is, however, as the kids say, "a choice."

fragmede5• 1 month ago

$700? $70,000 for a Patek Philippe Aquanaut!

vr463• 1 month ago

You could say the same about guitars and rollerskates - ending up in cupboards because they're cool but require effort to get anywhere with them. Musical devices are just like that, you get on with some and not with others.

If you can't tell the difference between jokes, irony and "unilaterally sh**g on people", then maybe you're taking low-stakes internet comments too seriously.

bigyabai2• 1 month ago

The APC-2, however, is a fascinating outcome
TE's amazing inventions
But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.

How anyone tells themselves this while buying Teenage Engineering gear is beyond me. The closest TE came to an "amazing invention" was the OP-Z, and that flopped like a fish on land. The whole business is a marketing-saturated DAWless hipster fantasy, hook line and sinker.

I was there when my properly talented musician friends bought the original OP-1, and I was also there when they sold it to afford a better MIDI controller. It's a Fischer-Price 4-track recorder, there's a very good reason you don't see your favorite musicians dailying it.

monster_truck• 1 month ago

The OP-Z was an absolute mess! That thinkpad bullshit they used to mold it from had curing issues that they never quite sorted out. Had one from the first run, wouldn't stay on or charge without a vice grip. They sent another one that also was not square/did not sit flat and suffers from intermittent shorts, attempting to use the pressure sensitive top button is a coinflip on it turning off. It's also quite colorblind-hostile, and is impossible to use outside or under bright stage lights. Needing an app to manage it was such a dumb choice. It definitely had some neat pre-MIDI 2.0 ideas but in practice most of what it offers is better handled further up the chain.

The OP-1 (and TX-6) on the other hand are excellent, I have 3 of them and love them dearly! Plenty of producers and bands still use them to great effect, the used price is evidence of this. Treating it as a controller is a pretty solid sign you've missed the point. Most midi devices are not able to cope with the bpm/playback speed shifting in response to the tape interactions (which is fully in spec). I did appreciate people offloading them for cheap.

vr463• 1 month ago

Again, lazy and unoriginal commentary regarding "DAWless Hipster Fantasy" - I mean, is buying any kind of instrument the same thing? Is a guitar? A piano?

Musicians will use absolutely anything to get the sound in their head out, so maybe they're not your favourite musicians, but everyone from Hans Zimmer to Tame Impala use them. You could have found that yourself.

copperx2• 1 month ago

It seems to me that Teenage Engineering's greatest achievement is the wholesale adoption of Jobs's reality distortion field.

If you re-read your own comment, do you experience cringe? If the answer is no, that's worrying and worth looking into.

fragmede5• 1 month ago

Do you like anything? Or have any enthusiasm for life? Is your whole bit just calling other people’s enthusiasm cringe?

FireBeyond• 1 month ago

S1E1 of Succession, on the topic of a Patek Phillipe...

"And it's amazingly precise! One look at your wrist and you know exactly how rich you are!"

whywhywhywhy2• 1 month ago

I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience

They essentially make toys for that demographic but theres nothing wrong with that if you get enjoyment out of it.

spicyusername• 1 month ago

Very cool.

I love this company and wish there was more like them.

999900000999• 1 month ago

Very strange.

It appears they’ll just rebrand a few record cutters and call it a product. TE always comes off as really low quality for the types of prices they charge.

The MPC Sample is 400$ and looks well built, the KO2 is 300$ and has faders falling off.

Roland has a few samplers in the same price range as well.

rumori• 1 month ago

Have both and none is falling apart. Both have their advantages, the Sample is a more robust and also just bland, KO2 is more fun and interesting. It’s comparable to Nintendo vs Sony, both excellent in their own way.

mvkel• 1 month ago

Don't think of Teenage Engineering as a device product company. Think of them as a device art company. Suddenly it makes sense.

hn_go_brrrrr• 1 month ago

So, Apple until the M chips?

wyre• 1 month ago

Apple is a consumer company selling device art. Teenage engineering is a device art company selling consumer products.

xrd• 1 month ago

Has anyone tried to 3d print vinyl?

hstaab• 1 month ago

Most 3D prints are vinyls already! the surface encodes some patterns of the motor movements and medium curing process. Shame it wouldn’t sound very good and there’s no machine to play them.

aa-jv• 1 month ago

Not 3D printed, but laser cut:

https://github.com/kallaballa/sndcut.git

Works pretty well, certainly not high quality audio, though. Maybe if someone out there has a more precise laser, it'd work ..

alnwlsn2• 1 month ago

Audio file to gcode is not difficult. Here's a record laser cut into a tortilla [0].

I once tried to mill one out of MDF on a CNC machine [1]. It didn't sound very good, but better than I expected.

3D printing one seems very difficult, since 3D printers build walls instead of cut grooves. Maybe you could play it if you had some kind of bifurcated needle? Anyways, it's enough of a joke that it probably wouldn't work well that it was a Prusa April fools joke [2].

A better printer, maybe a resin one, can do it [3].

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdzCv_9eaoM

1 - https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/wooden-you-like-to-hear-a-cn...

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV1egpbrg90

3 - https://hackaday.com/2012/12/21/3d-printing-records/

jrflo• 1 month ago

I think it's cool that they make stuff like this. It's refreshing to see something engineered for the sake of being beautiful and cool, instead of worrying about BOM cost and margin.

snvzz• 1 month ago

Why wouldn't you use an ADC and store music digitally?

gf263• 1 month ago

Inb4 all the commenters going “umm, why would I want this? I could simply burn a CD or make a Spotify playlist if I wanted to share music”

tcbawo• 1 month ago

I always loved the story of the "three-sided" Monty Python record, where the B side had two parallel concentric grooves, causing different tracks to play depending on where the needle was dropped. I always wondered what kind of equipment went into producing it.

dhosek3• 1 month ago

From what I know about record manufacturing, creating the lacquer master would involve adjusting the angle of the groove to allow for two concentric grooves to be laid, along with some care in creating that master. But once it’s done, the manufacturing process is handled through a stamping process (so a vinyl record isn’t cut, it’s pressed with a metal die that’s created from the lacquer master through electroplating).

TylerE2• 1 month ago

You’d cut it normal equipment, with very wide groove spacing. Start the two grooves 180 degrees out of phase. They’ll never intersect.

You could do it with more than two grooves, just to having them at 360/n degrees apart. You’ll just have to make the groove spacing wider as the number of tracks go off. Of course that comes at the cost of playback tine.

gizajob3• 1 month ago

A Porky prime cut.

ogn3rd• 1 month ago

Jack White did something similar with Lazaretto.

mapontosevenths• 1 month ago

I bought a Record Store Day release of Ella Fitzgerald live in Berlin that did this around 2020. Very cool stuff.

chriscjcj• 1 month ago

De La Soul's 12" Single for "Me Myself And I" also has its second side cut with two grooves. The hype sticker says, "3 Sides." Each time you put the needle down you have a 50/50 chance to hear the song you're trying to hear. :-)

https://www.discogs.com/master/19554-De-La-Soul-Me-Myself-An...

cloud8421• 1 month ago

The same goes for the 1994 first pressing of Marillion's Brave.

Side 4 has a double groove, which would give you either The Great Escape + Made again (a sort of a happy ending) or The Great Escape + 20 minutes of water sounds (which can be interpreted as the sad ending).

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(Marillion_album)#Vinyl_... (I also have a copy and can confirm indeed it works like that).

foobar1962• 1 month ago

Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief Executive Version.

squeedles• 1 month ago

When I was a kid, we had a "record producer" board game and the randomizer was a 45rpm record with three concentric grooves. You did a needle drop and it said It's a Hit, It's a Flop, or Break Even.

EDIT- Apparently it was the K-Tel Superstar game

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4521/k-tel-superstar-gam...

gregsadetsky2• 1 month ago

Unrelated, but related - if you want to have 1 record made, reach out to https://recordcut.com/

Their hours are "2:30 PM to 12 Midnight", I sort of believe... 7 days a week?

Rich will actually answer the phone, and guide you. I've done it a few times (it's an incredibly cool gift). A single record is $12. Extremely worth experiencing it.

scratchyone• 1 month ago

ooh, this seems super cool. i see that he doesn't print jackets, have you gotten them printed elsewhere for that?

gregsadetsky2• 1 month ago

yeah, I glued the jacket together - but no, I didn't get it printed professionally. that's a great thought!

alacritas0• 1 month ago

I need to remember this when I buy gifts

Herdinger• 1 month ago

Similarly if you're in Europe I recommend:

https://drdub.com/en/faq/

I've done it twice and had a great experience, although in the 10X pricing range compared to recordcut.com.

I've used https://www.online-druck.biz/lp-cover.html for the sleeve, but I don't know if they ship internationally.

dackdel• 1 month ago

id pay to watch mkbhd(or similar) review the apc-2. and compare one made on apc-2 to someone like recordcut(or similar). that said. im glad companies like teenage are catering to the whimsy. because why not. im sure it will sell out. and they will stop producing it after they have scratched the itch of wanting to create a product like it. and hopefully after that we can get our hands on the un-redacted files.

Stevvo• 1 month ago

Why would you pay for a review from a smartphone reviewer who likely has never listened to Vinyl?

edb_123• 1 month ago

Vestax actually did something similar in the early 2000s with the VRX-2000 lathe cutter. It cost around $10K back then.

The audio wasn't the best, but hey, you could make your own dubplates, and it did so in stereo!

fragmede5• 1 month ago

APC is an interesting choice of name. A Professional record Cutter.

I wonder if they chose it because of the APC40, which is a delightful set of MIDI pads.

emsign• 1 month ago

Fancy machine for just making dubplates.

geokon• 1 month ago

I wonder if it can make a flexidisc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc

I remember to listening to some in my childhood and never understood why the tech was not the standard (relative to the brittle cumbersome vinyls). Maybe the sound quality is worse. Unsure

vortegne• 1 month ago

Worse sound quality and even worse longevity.

trq01758• 1 month ago

Because brittle really is a second name for Flexi disc. They have shallower groove which means limited dynamic range, higher hiss/surface noise/distortion, plus because they are so light they often don't sit flat on a turntable so welcome speed variations aka "wow and flutter" and frequent skipping. You could listen 500-1000 times to normal vinyl before any audible degradation and the same may happen to Flexi disc after 5 or 10 times.

drcongo• 1 month ago

I remember our home stereo in the 1970s had a rubber non-slip-matt with concentric grooves in it, often flexi-discs were so flexi that that the needle would follow the groove on the other side instead of the one on the disc. They were almost unplayable on that unless you set the tonearm counter-weights to as light as possible.

That built-in obsolescence was often the point of flexi-discs as they were typically used as giveaways in magazines with the goal of promoting the artist - the faster it wears out, the sooner the consumer is likely to go purchase the real thing.

bux93• 1 month ago

Flexi discs were cool inserts for some home computer magazines; you'd dub the flexi disc to music cassette, and the noise and beeps were computer programs for your home computer.

nubinetwork• 1 month ago

Aren't vinyls typically pressed, not carved from a blank? I wonder how accurate they can actually get if they have to carve every notch into the groove.

dale_glass4• 1 month ago

You need to carve the master to have something to press from.

Flipflip79• 1 month ago

The original master is cut. Only subsequent copies are pressed. This is the standard way records are made

hudo• 1 month ago

Master is carved (cutted), and then reverse master pressed, from which all the records are then pressed, if i remember correctly.

dale_glass4• 1 month ago

How does it buffer audio?

One thing I didn't realize for a long time is that it turns out that a lot of these machines have a digital stage. To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible. But the spiral isn't fixed, it's adjusted dynamically. Quiet sections can be packed close together. That means that before cutting, the machine needs to know how much physical space it needs for the audio it's about to put on the disk. And that requires a buffer, and that's very often digital. So it turns out there's precious little vinyl out there without a digital step being involved out there.

Not that it matters anyway, since vinyl is a pretty terrible technology, but still, it's kind of funny.

gizajob3• 1 month ago

It’s great technology for long-term archiving.

“Look ahead” to determine optimal groove spacing doesn’t have to be done digitally, even though digital makes this much simpler.

I’d guess that musicians and producers using an all-analogue recording / mixing / mastering process where they have zero digital stages to the master tape are very few and far between nowadays. Kevin Shields for one, but he likely has other options for his analogue master disk cutting, and only needs to attend disc cutting once or twice a decade/century.

A transparent digital stage for the master isn’t going to make a huge amount of difference really, and the limited bandwidth of vinyl compared to digital means that the vinyl master has to be squashed and limited regardless.

Daub• 1 month ago

I’s great technology for long-term archiving.

Dam right. It’s a medium that a reasonably intelligent individual from any time in future/past history could intuitively understand. Let’s not forget that NASA chose a record to store the digital images it sent with Voyager on precisely that assumption.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...

ufocia4• 1 month ago

Vinyl is not great for archiving. It degrades and is affected by dust.

bayindirh4• 1 month ago

There's digital and there's digital. If you look at some of the technology used for A/D and D/A conversion, it's possible to do it lossless way. I learnt this after I started recording my bass and this is a very deep rabbit hole.

If they are using well refined conversion paths with enough bit depth, that buffer stage will be completely invisible even at the waveform level.

As a person who likes, buys and listens vinyl, I don't care how it's processed to that stage as long as it sounds fine. Note that I don't buy vinyl because of the "sound quality per se", but for the experience of listening it. I like to make time to listen my favorite albums properly, and vinyl is a part of that for some albums. I'm equally fine with audio from a CD or a well encoded lossy codec. I can distinguish between lossy and lossless encoding of the same album, but I don't always have time to appreciate that.

So, some references (This guy has enough knowledge to write his own DSP plugins):

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuecg-5Gvn8

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-MGXDXR4x0

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fmCy686IC8

Jgrubb2• 1 month ago

Vinyl is a terrible technology?? Have you never put on an old record and considered the miracle of it?

70 years ago Miles Davis vibrates some air with his horn, which is translated into electricity by a microphone, which is translated through magnetic tape and eventually back into electricity and then back into vibrations on a disk. 70 years later I can take that disk and turn its vibrations back into electricity that moves the air on my living room. No encoding, no decoding, just air and electricity that my ancestors will be able to replay until the end of time.

That's as close to magic as anything humanity has ever come up with in my opinion.

dale_glass4• 1 month ago

It is bad by modern standards. Low capacity, high noise, imperfect stereo separation, pretty bad frequency response. CD quality audio solves every problem perfectly and it's old and dirt cheap at this point. To even approach that with vinyl you have to fuss over needles, weight, turntable mechanics and so on and and spend a lot of money and still won't get there.

Personally I see far more magic in digital electronics. Storing vibrations physically is neat and clever, but none of that looks particularly magic to me. Just a straightforward, logical solution to a problem. More elegant simplicity than magic really.

jlarcombe• 1 month ago

yes, they mostly use a digital delay, although some mastering houses still have a reel-to-reel equipped with an extra 'preview' head that gives the required lookahead for the lathe without any A/D conversion in the audio path.

taylodl4• 1 month ago

Most music today is digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered. It's at the end they distribute it on vinyl and sell it for a fortune. They're literally fleecing people. Now I will tell you digital is far superior to analog BUT - the way music is recorded and mixed today takes all the soul out of music. Rigidly fixing to "the grid" makes it so music can't breathe. Drums are programmed. So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists.

In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.

brookst• 1 month ago

You’ve mixed up a few different stages as well as the reason some people prefer vinyl.

There’s composition, where music is written. A drum track may be a boring repetitive loop quantized to 4/4 beat positions, or it may have fills or polyrhythm or free time or who knows what.

There’s performance, which may be a sequencer just outputting notes at the right time or may be a human drummer of varying skill, imparting sloppiness or brilliant micro timing.

There’s recording, which today is virtually always digital, but which can theoretically be analogue tape or other exotic forms.

There’s storage medium, where we get vinyl or FLAC or MP3.

And there’s playback, where your choice of system components matters.

You can digitally record, mix, and master a bunch of drunk teenagers who don’t know how to play, and I promise it will be gloriously analog. And you can take music that was composed on an sequencer with pure quantization and no human feel at all, record/master/mix digitally, and store it on vinyl and play it in a good system and the sound will have analog warmth even while the composition and performance do not.

There’s more artistry in music today than there ever has been. More music is release every single day than was released in any entire year before 2000.

You just have to find the good stuff. If you’re hearing boring corporate crap, that reflects a need to improve discovery skill to match this new world.

finghin• 1 month ago

There are loads of small independent labels and distributors that release vinyl, CDs and tapes and there is nothing corporate about it. It’s basically impossible to make money as a small-med artist on vinyl. Please don’t generalise like that, it’s really not fair and weakens your comment for me

embedding-shape2• 1 month ago

In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.

Incredibly daft over-generalization, the music scene is enormous, and while for mainstream artists what you say is certainly true, you're forgetting about the rest of the 80% of the music scene, which is mostly just people who like making music and don't even earn enough to make a living from it.

ndiddy• 1 month ago

Most music today is digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered. It's at the end they distribute it on vinyl and sell it for a fortune. They're literally fleecing people.

Most vinyl record buyers buy records as a collectable to show that they like a certain album, not because they're deluded audiophiles who are trying to eliminate everything digital from their audio path. Half of all record buyers don't even own a record player: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50-of-vinyl-buyers-do... . When you look at it from that lens, I think it makes sense that records are so popular. They're the largest music format so you get the biggest version of the album art and the most extensive set of liner notes compared to buying a CD or something. Audio quality or "analogness" doesn't matter, since they're probably going to be listening to the album on Spotify instead anyway.

jeremyloy_wt• 1 month ago

the way music is recorded and mixed today takes all the soul out of music
So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists

I’m sure the session musicians don’t appreciate this statement. Just because they can play with high precision and reliability doesn’t mean they are playing without soul.

If the featured artists can’t do so on their own, that’s sort of a knock on them, isn’t it?

adw• 1 month ago

So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists.

In pop music this has been true since the 60s. For independent music it has mostly never been true. This hasn't changed much.

voidpointer• 1 month ago

To implement groove packing digitally, you don't need to put that process in the signal chain, do you? You can digitize the master, analyze it, and determine the required spacing at various points on the record. You then feed that information back to the machine to control the cutting processes, as the analog signal is transferred directly to the record. No digital buffer in the signal path.

ssl-3• 1 month ago

To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible.

Strictly speaking, the grooves only need to be cut as close as necessary in order for music to fit, while remaining far-enough apart that they don't interact too much.

Packing as many grooves (and thus as much material) as possible onto one side of a disk isn't always a goal, although it can be a goal.

But the spiral isn't fixed, it's adjusted dynamically. Quiet sections can be packed close together.

Aye. Or the whole thing can be made quieter. Or dynamically-compressed first, and then made quieter. Or if it's a relatively short work, it can tolerate being louder and/or more-dynamic even though that takes up more physical space. There's lots of knobs here, and all of these knobs can be turned.

That means that before cutting, the machine needs to know how much physical space it needs for the audio it's about to put on the disk.

That's not quite right. The process should ideally know this in advance, but that process can include a skilled human operator. And since we still have humans, it is not necessary for the machine itself to figure all of this out on its own.

Like many other kinds of machine work, a lot of it can be boiled down to some moral equivalent of speeds and feeds. There's a good chance that you've worked with this at home with a 3D printer by winding things up or down manually as a print progresses and observing the results. (Except: This is subtractive instead of additive, and we hear the results instead of seeing them.)

I see nothing that suggests that this record lathe can't be manually controlled. Instead, I see suggestion (based on the snippet about locked grooves being possible) that very fine, deliberate control is exactly what it is made to allow.

One can therefore add whatever knobs they want at whatever layer the combination of this device and one's skills permit, and send it. If the process fails, then learn from that and try again.

It's OK when it fails. Fucking things up is a time-honored tradition: At most stages of the recording/mixing/mastering/distribution process, it's pretty uncommon to one-shot anything.

Blank discs aren't necessarily expensive. It's OK to fuck them up.

gwbas1c2• 1 month ago

How does it buffer audio?

The page says DAW integration, but I assume the inputs are analog. IE, I assume the playback is on the computer and uses whatever DAC the engineer has set up.

To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible.

In the analog, computer-free world, that was done by hand and typically had about 15-20 minutes per side. I've come across records that got close to 30 minutes per side, from the late 1960s or 1970s, and very specifically mentioned that it was a computer-controlled process. (And also that you needed to turn the volume up.)

lebuffon3• 1 month ago

Old guy here. I brought a few masters into RCA in Toronto, just before dinosaurs went extinct.

At that time they used a Studer A80 (if memory serves) 1/2 track machine, modified, with an extra playback head that was placed before the head stack so it read the music on tape about 500mS before the playback head got it. The extra head sound was fed to the motor controller that controlled the speed of the cutting head feed motor that turned the screw that controlled the pitch depth of the grooves.

When the preview head sound was loud, the screw motor would slow down to make bigger grooves and then return to normal when the audio envelope was smaller.

That's how they optimized groove spacing before digital buffers. :-)

alnwlsn2• 1 month ago

Do you need to, or only if you care about fitting the longest possible recording on the disk?

How much shorter would an LP be if you used a fixed pitch?

picofarad3• 1 month ago

Well, mindless self indulgence is very loud and aggresive, so an album that is a single CD is 2 vinyls.

I'd have to use my usb record player and rip some records and determine loudness vs length to get some baseline, though.

Then again, maybe most CD albums are two LPs, I only have a half dozen 2-LP albums, most older stuff is single LP.

Is that because albums have gotten longer, or louder? Both?

ghostly_s• 1 month ago

I would guess if anyone wants to use this thing it will mostly be for 12" singles, optimal groove packing is not a concern for them.

avsn• 1 month ago

Originally lathe cuts were used by producers in electronic genres namely jungle/DnB as a way to test yet unreleased tracks on the dance floor. Those records were created in very low numbers and could only survive a handful of plays. As stated here in the comments, producing such records requires a great amount of skill and understanding of the process, as well as understanding the way tracks translate to physical media. TE here again does a great amount of art-washing and Supreme-isation of previously "niche" things for the audience that treats music culture as a costume. A great toy for average Rick Rubin book enjoyer.

bayindirh4• 1 month ago

...and here's a great documentary about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

This is a video about Amen Break, read from a wax disc which can't survive more than 5-6 plays.

trumpdong2• 1 month ago

direct drive precision polished tungsten shaft

Isn't marketing wonderful. Who cares what the motor shaft is made of? (and why not ordinary steel? tungsten just sounds cooler? they want to reuse it for a lightbulb filament later?)

aembleton• 1 month ago

I suppose its better than it being made of rust like so many other projects like to advertise.

vile_wretch• 1 month ago

Tungsten will certainly isolate better than other softer metals. The entire product is centred around embedding vibrations into a physical object. The material that is used to transfer or isolate those vibrations is important especially at signal levels used in lathe cutting.

iainctduncan• 1 month ago

This is fantastic. There is a shortage of places that can press vinyl, making it very difficult to start an indy label. Vinyl (believe it or not) is going up in sales, many young people want to own a physical product of music, even if they don't have turntables. It's a way to support acts. Selling vinyl is thus one of the ways indy acts and labels can actually make money.

Is there a performative and marketing element? sure. But that's the music world, a great deal is performative. We have depended on patrons who want to support the arts and be seen supporting the arts for time immemorial.

Joel_Mckay• 1 month ago

A lot of fans don't own a player, and just want to collect cool cover art. =3

ufocia4• 1 month ago

You could just sell old vinyl with new labels and sleeves and they would be none the wiser.

allears• 1 month ago

This isn't a press, it's a cutter. It's used to make vinyl masters, which are then used to create a mold for pressing. This device will only make discs slowly, one at a time. You would still need a bunch more machinery to press a quantity of discs. However, a vinyl master, although it has a limited playback life, is the best vinyl sound you're gonna get.

musictubes• 1 month ago

Dinsynch makes an “acoustic lathe” for a little less than $2k. It doesn’t look nearly as cool as the TE setup but will probably be similar in execution and quality.

https://youtu.be/udQC04YrXq0

Actual transcription lathes will be much more expensive and I think can record on better material. Those can be used for direct to disc recording production. I’m not sure if what TE and Dinsync offer can make something that can be used for production.

MoonWalk• 1 month ago

Thought cool; clicked on the link; saw it was Teenage Engineering; and closed the tab.

Their track record consists of vastly overpriced and under-functioning products.

waffletower• 1 month ago

Given Teenage Engineering's long history of premium boutique pricing, I don't see this device being priced for individuals outside of the 1% demographic. My price estimate: $25,000 US. But to their credit, even this cost would be far cheaper than purchasing a traditional vinyl pressing machine (~$200,000)

mieses2• 1 month ago

Awesome design as always but Teenage Engineering has zero product support. After they make and sell a product they move on to other cool ideas. If anything stops to function you are left with just form.

APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

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