[dale_glass]

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.

[voidpointer]

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.

[taylodl]

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]

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.

[MrBuddyCasino]

There is another reason some people prefer vinyl, which is that they often used a different master than later releases. The medium, be it AAC, vinyl or CD really doesn't matter as much as what master has been used. There are CD pressings that don't sound as good as the vinyl, because they used a different master tape. A lot of this was the result of the loudness wars and the resulting reduced dynamic range, or even downright clipping (eg RHCP).

Some albums you cannot get digitally with the best sounding master version.

[taylodl]

I was talking about modern mastering, not what had been done back in the analog era when digital media had first been introduced.

[strogonoff]

What’s your current process for discovering new music?

[klodolph]

(I know you didn’t ask me)

I think a willingness to listen to unfamiliar albums and unfamiliar genres is all you really need. I look for “best of X” lists, which get posted everywhere from actual newspapers to niche sites nline forums, Twitter, and personal blogs. Type in different values for “X” and you get exposure to more music.

[scottyeager]

Community and listener supported radio stations can be a great resource. I discover a lot of music via a local station I discovered by surfing on the FM dial. Most stations offer online streams these days and some even produce video content too (Live at KEXP is one favorite, and NPR's Tiny Desk is in a similar vein). Non corporate coffee shops are usually playing some music selected by the baristas and I found some favorites that way too.

When I find something new, I like to look up live performances from that artist on YouTube. Sometimes people in the comments mention other similar artists or the source that led them to the video. YouTube's algorithm is a bit of a dark and dangerous thing overall, but I do sometimes follow a suggestion for music that I end up loving.

[AyyEye]

Find your local music venues -- the smaller the better. Listen to the artists that are coming to play. When you find something you like, see where they are touring and look up the other venues because a lot of them specialize in different types of music. Rinse and repeat.

[embedding-shape]

Maybe a more producer/DJ-focused way of finding new music, I use the "Most Recent" view for my favorite genres on Beatport, literally listen through / skim all of it, particularly for the more niche genres. Then also follow smaller music labels on Bandcamp (that some of my favorite artists are signed with sometimes too), as they tend to specialize in some niches, and basically does the discovering for you.

[taylodl]

I'm an amateur musician and I've been gigging, playing, and jamming with musicians for decades. There's nothing wrong with today's song writing and compositions. The problem is the tools used to record, and mix (and to a much lesser extent, master). They "encourage" a particular workflow - a workflow that's anathema to music.

Analog is crap - that analog "warmth" is snake oil - but the old analog workflow of recording and mixing yields music that resonates with people. The best of all worlds would be to capture that analog workflow using digital tools.

[jeremyloy_wt]

> 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?

[taylodl]

Session musicians know full-well what they bring to the table. They also know the trade-off: they're not interested in the continued touring, dealing with fans, having to create new material, etc., etc., etc. They're "no drama" kind of people.

BUT - to make any money as a session musician, certainly enough to make a living, you have to be good. Damn good.

[embedding-shape]

> 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.

[adw]

> 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.

[finghin]

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

[ndiddy]

> 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.

[scherlock]

I buy vinyl because I like the tangibleness if the medium. Seeing the tracks on the record, the liner notes, lyric sheets, photos, etc. It's great when the artist really embraces the format and goes all out. My player is a low end unit with built in speakers, but my youngest can listen to his records easily. We go to a local record store once a month and walk out with random records, some new some used.

[ssl-3]

> 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.

[gizajob]

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]

> 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...

[bayindirh]

Also it can be "read" non intrusively with a laser-pickup, like a CD, without wearing the medium down.

[PaulHoule]

It works and sounds like a good idea but boy do lasers see dust spots and things like that.

[bayindirh]

I believe they indeed do, but for digitizing rare records, they are much better than their physical counterparts. Considering that we can now remove these pops and clicks way better than we did before, it's a worthy thing to have for preservation purposes:

Laser Turntable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable

Click and Pop Removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LvCRzWCpU

[ufocia]

Archival optical media is likely much better than any kind of open groove technology.

[ufocia]

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

[gwbas1c]

> 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.)

[lebuffon]

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. :-)

[ufocia]

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

[gwbas1c]

I still wonder if the circuitry was analog or digital, though. That could have been an analog "computer".

[bayindirh]

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

[jlarcombe]

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.

[alnwlsn]

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?

[picofarad]

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]

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.

[Jgrubb]

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_glass]

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.

[dijksterhuis]

It's bad, according to your definition of what good is.

I enjoy all those things you've listed as bad :shrug:

[Jgrubb]

Yes. Not to mention, I have several crates of records that I've had since the 90s. Some of those were taken from my dad collection that he bought new back in the 60s. Those albums still play just fine, despite less than archival care taken.

Contrast that with several folders of CDs I still have which have begun to delaminate and are plastic trash now. CDs were largely an invention to allow record companies to resell back catalogs, and it worked.

[dale_glass]

I meant CD quality audio, as in 44.1 KHz/16 bit digital files, not specifically the CD physical medium. It's an old invention and still fulfills every playback need possible, let alone for old audiophiles who long stopped being able to hear the highest frequencies anyway.