Vinyl cutter makes CDs into 45 RPM records
Over at the mother Boing, Cory spotted this fantastic mod: armed with a vintage vinyl record cutter, Aleks Kolkowski attended Manchester's Futuresonic 2008 festival, burning audio files for festival goers on old, discarded compact dics and making them capable of being played on any old phonograph. Golden-eared audiophiles will now have a new aspect to consider in the Vinyl vs. CD debate: does a record CD sound better than vinyl?
CD Recycled 45 RPM [Futuresonic via Oh Gizmo]
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That is very cool.
"old, discarded compact dics?"
This would pair nicely with the Edison-style cylinder recorder previously mentioned that uses plastic cups as its media...
I have visions of sending out a demo disk with optical on one side and a groove on the other... Wouldn't work with CDRs, where the reflective layer is on the label side and probably wouldn't survive the cutting process... but might with some of the other variants.
Oh damn, this is fantastic. Thanks.
Is one side read by CD laser, and the other by the record player? Like braille on top of writing?
You could record 20-30 minutes of audio on the CD, which burns from the inside out, and then put the grooves for the phonograph from the outside in, just taking care not to overlap and to make sure the final cut on the phonograph side won't cause the needle to skate across the rest of the disc.
I remember reading in some Australian magazine a few years ago about someone who had found an old record cutter in his attic and tried to use it, but before the put the cutting weight on (which was laid flat in the bottom of the box), the recordings sounded like dragging barbed wire across a flagpole.
#5... Yeah, that could work. Good thought, Certron.
Thanks, TechnoGeek, but of course, that means that the moment I mentioned it, someone has spontaneously gone back in time and made a whole webpage about it, maintaining the cycle of my never having had a truly original thought... Trust me, I'll find it!
That's actually pretty damn cool.
I'd guess you get about 90 seconds of crackly high end out of this process. Nice for novelty, pointless for audio.
Pointless for audio, yes, but still maximum points for cool.
Given a properly adjusted cutter, it seems to me you _should_ be able to get the same sound quality out of these as out of vinyl records. If I remember correctly, it was possible to get about 5 minutes onto one side of a standard 45 disk; you should be able to get one pop song's worth of audio in both groove and optical onto a single disk.
But I agree that this is a "who cares if it's practical, it's just plain entertaining" idea.
#5 Is one side read by CD laser, and the other by the record player?
if there was such a player that plays both sides together, you could have acapella on one side and music on the other and play both together or remix ... the non-practical possibilities are so entertaining