The short version
If you are an aging, slightly art-damaged music nerd with a penchant for the 90′s and vinyl, you need to buy this book. If you have ever self-released music, or helped assemble a run of hand-made …
'Vinyl' Archive
This isn’t a life-changing application or anything, but I was pretty thrilled to discover RetroPlayer – an OS X gramophone emulator. Launch the program and you get a top-down view of a gramophone, sans record. Drag any audio file into …
Valentine Hellman checked in today with easily the best email I’ve received in a long time. Valentine, you see, OWNS a platinum record. He’s taken it upon himself to play it and determine what exactly the grooves of a default …
Shortly after posting my round up of vinyl video implementations, the eBay market price for the carousels used to view Red Raven Animation records dropped significantly, and I was able to pick one up for far cheaper than they …
I have about 30 emails which date back to February rotting in my inbox, under the pretense that I’m somehow going to find the time to ‘properly’ research and present the information contained therein. Since it’s becoming increasingly obvious that …
Based on the obsessive-compulsive nature of my previous postings on all aspects of vinyl technology, several people have recommended that I check out Vinyl Video, an artistic venture by a collective of European artists, who encode black and …
A band called The 8 Bit Construction Set is getting a touch of internet publicity by claiming that their record is “the first ever use of the vinyl recording medium for software distribution.” Not so.…
Vincent Marquardt writes:
”When I was about 10 years old, someone gave me a bunch of 45′s, all lousy no-name performers; No wonder they were giving them away!”
”Anyhow, one of them was a female singer singing a song called
…
I finally got my hands on that functional japanese gramophone model kit thing that I wrote about here. What follows is my review! Get excited!
I’d previously been thwarted in my efforts to order it through Amazon Japan. …
Kim Stahr, the person whose copy of Shellac’s ‘The Futurist’ LP recently sold on EBay for $810 emailed me the other day. You can read about the reasons this was percieved as significant in my previous post. Kim wrote:…
…presenting yet another addendum to my series of vinyl trivialities.
Alternate playback methods
I’ve turned up (and had suggested to me) a number of interesting variations on record playback whilst ‘researching’ vinyl oddities. On the ridiculous audiophile end of …
Toys
It was pointed out to me in the comments for my article on parallel grooves that one of the most ingenious uses of this technology is in children’s toys, the classic example being the See & Say – a …
One strategy that major record companies have been employing lately to deter downloading is adding bonus computer content to new CD releases. I recently discovered that this technique is not unique to CD’s, but had in fact been practiced in …
Response to the vinyl manufacturing saga thus far, from Sarah:
“Get a room, man! ENOUGH’S ENOUGH.”
With that in mind, I present yet another installment.
Another fun trick that can be employed while cutting the master plates for a vinyl …
I’ve been writing about interesting vinyl manufacturing anomolies for the past few days. Tuesday I covered Flexo Records and flexidiscs, and yesterday I wrote about parallel grooves. Today’s bit is about ‘Lock grooves:’ grooves that feed back into …
Some of the more interesting variations that can occur during vinyl manufacturing occur while the master plates are being cut. While a normal record’s grooves consist of one continuous spiral, the only strict limitations on how the grooves can be …
In addition to the regular procession of unrelated entries, I’m going to try and do a sort of ‘theme’ every so often. The point of this is to force myself to post bits of larger topics that my brain usually …