Can digital data be stored on vinyl?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Murphy13, Aug 1, 2015.

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  1. Murphy13

    Murphy13 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Portland
    just curious I know it can be stored on tape. If so, what's the slowest speed could the record rotate to work? Is this being done anywhere since vinyl is considered a decent archive medium.

    Better yet, could metal discs instead of vinyl hold data as well ( not digital hard drives)?
     
  2. Jim T

    Jim T Forum Resident

    Location:
    Mars
    I don't think that I have ever heard that vinyl is a "decent" medium for archiving. Digital at 24/96, 24/192, or DSD, but you must have some drive backups.

    If it was my tracks I would want nothing but a minimum of 24/192, but that would be if this was my business. Vinyl IMHO is a playback medium. Too many horror stories of even mylar not being stored properly and any chance of a good remaster is out the window.
     
  3. krisbee

    krisbee Forum Resident

    Of course it can... Back in the old days we stores data on tape, audio tape. Wouldnt be able to store much, but yup. However, im sure optical is just as robust as vinyl. Its all plastic. The problem is the oxidizing of the metal on the dvd/cds when inferior glue or a problem in the process occurs, but you could vacuum seal optical media and not have the issue, I would think...
     
  4. The FRiNgE

    The FRiNgE Forum Resident

    Open reel tape was the first digital storage medium I seem to recall. But a digital vinyl disc would be possible with an optical reader, but I do not know if that was ever tried. A metal disc is a much better medium, ie: video laser discs, and the common CD's.
     
  5. tribby2001

    tribby2001 Forum Resident

    Should the question be, can digital data be stored in an analog form?

    Sure! Morse code comes to mind. Matter of fact it's all analog.

    Digital over analog telephone lines
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2015
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  6. tribby2001

    tribby2001 Forum Resident

    Last edited: Aug 1, 2015
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  7. OcdMan

    OcdMan Senior Member

    Location:
    Maryland
    I remember seeing computer programs stored on records called Floppy ROMs.
     
  8. colinu

    colinu I'm not lazy, I'm energy saving!

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  9. mikeyt

    mikeyt Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
    I read somewhere that the Church of Scientology was actually transferring recordings of L Ron Hubbard to vinyl for their archives. I suppose if they were stored properly in a cool and controlled environment there's less worry about something happening versus recordings stored digitally on a drive. And with the way that technology evolves, perhaps way down the line it may be easier to listen to an LP than finding something compatible to see digital content.
     
  10. Dinstun

    Dinstun Forum Resident

    Location:
    Middle Tennessee
    Certainly digital data can be stored on about anything with physical memory. Computer punch cards, piano rolls, printed paper come to mind.

    The real question is not really if, but how much data could it hold? I doubt a vinyl disc would hold enough to be feasible. Remember than one $2 dual layer blu ray disc can store more than 400 billion bits. And that technology will soon be outdated. How many 12" vinyl discs would be needed for this?
     
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  11. Heavy Music

    Heavy Music Forum Resident

    Can digital data be stored on vinyl?
    Sure, but playback would be a bitch!
     
  12. Murphy13

    Murphy13 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Portland
    Why would one need an optical reader? Old cassettes with computer data did not
     
  13. The FRiNgE

    The FRiNgE Forum Resident

    Hey Murphy,
    The cassettes were magnetic medium weren't they? Digital data is stored magnetically or optically via physical pits or burned dye.
     
  14. Chooke

    Chooke Forum Resident

    Location:
    Perth, Australia
    Yes if it wasn't analogue we wouldn't hear a sound. We can't hear digital and likewise, imagine listening to an analogue tape without the magnetic particles being converted to an analogue signal...
     
  15. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Sure you could, but the data rate would be slow, and encoding and especially decoding would be impacted by all the noise and distortion inherent in vinyl. In some regards it's probably worse than a phone line, since you have wow and flutter to deal with, off-center spindle holes, warps and the like. Also the high-harmonics injected into the signal by needle and cartridge resonances, and all the amplification the preamp has to do.

    Cassette tape recorders used by old 8-bit computers like the Atari 800. The Atari 410 and 1010 program recorders could transfer data at 600 bits per second - that's 600 baud, or .075 kilobits per second. Those tape decks had pretty good fidelity, and only used one stereo track for data - the other track was used for audio playback. In theory using modern technology you could probably squeeze a lot more out of cassette - Digital Compact Cassette managed 768kBps for example, recording eight 96kBps parallel tracks, using a tape formulation that was identical to videotape.

    Unfortunately those tricks don't work on vinyl, but I'm wondering if its ability to record ultrasonics (used for quad back in the '70s) could be exploited somehow, and might even be used to help overcome some of vinyl's issues with noise and irregularity by recording some kind of pilot signal.

    I'm thinking using modern encoding tricks and really high-end cutting technology, vinyl formulations, plus special styli like those used for quad you could probably cram about as much data onto a vinyl record as you can onto a CD, or around 600MB, assuming you can keep it dust and scratch free. If you want to make it more robust though you'd have to add more error recovery data (like record everything twice a few seconds apart), so your capacity would effectively be halved.

    There's a reddit thread of all things where someone asked the same question and folks took a stab at giving an answer: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12iyb9/how_much_data_does_a_vinyl_lp_hold/

    Vinyl would be a really sh*tty medium for archiving digital data. I think microfilm would almost certainly work better (and be a lot less expensive to produce and to decode reliably - take up less space, too. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm kinda surprised film was never exploited more as an audio medium. I'm thinking you could do something like the helical scan used by videotape to record gobs of audio on film at a fairly low linear speed. I'm assuming someone must have tried at some point - maybe tape and vinyl were just too established.
     
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  16. Don Hills

    Don Hills Forum Resident

    Soundstream experimented with this, using an index-card sized piece of film. The play head had 4 scanning heads, working similar to helical scan tape. It was called the AudioFile system. If you have access to back issues of Hi-Fi News and Record Review (a UK magazine), there was an article in the January 1983 issue. Soundstream and DRC (their parent company) had several patents around the process. The AudioFile implementation was best described by US4219704.
     
  17. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Interesting, but not surprising that someone would have thought about it at the time. Wikipedia briefly touches on it in their article about the company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundstream

    Sounds like CD got there first.
     
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  18. The FRiNgE

    The FRiNgE Forum Resident

    I haven't read up on this at all since it's irrelevant, and we already have our digital media. But I think if record was half speed mastered, and using your idea for the helical encoding similar to that used for quadraphonic, then the record may support a high enough bit rate (rotating at 33 1/3 or 45 RPM) to reproduce the source faithfully... just a guess. But then the record would have to spin at a constant linear speed, which means its playback RPM would have to vary, like a CD. Does the OP mean a record as he uses the term "vinyl"? I have no idea what I'm talking about! :whistle:
     
  19. delmonaco

    delmonaco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sofia, Bulgaria
    The common computer hard disc resembles pretty much vinyl playback... I'm not sure if it's possible the hard disk to be made from vinyl, and if it's possible it wouldn't practical, but in theory I think it can be done.

    [​IMG]
     
  20. McLover

    McLover Senior Member

    Wouldn't a TimeCode vinyl LP for something like Serato Scratch Live be a sort of digital data application on LP disc? I think the control signal is.
     
  21. Tyler Eaves

    Tyler Eaves Forum Resident

    Location:
    Greenville, NC
    No it doesn't, not at all, beyond both involving a spinning disk. It's a magnetic system built on transition from one polarization to another, with various encoding schemes built on top of that. NOTHING like vinyl in any way that matters at all. Much more like, for obvious reasons, DAT.
     
  22. Damien DiAngelo

    Damien DiAngelo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Michigan, USA
    There was a record released back in the early '80s. I don't remember exactly what band, or album it was. I know folks on this board knows. There was a Sinclair ZX-80 program as the last track (IIRC).
    So, yes you can store digital data on vinyl.
     
  23. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California
    You can and it would be a real stupid idea to do so, sort of like resurrecting the punch card as that's about as much data as you could get on an LP. So just say no.
     
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  24. tribby2001

    tribby2001 Forum Resident

    Sure you can "hear" digital. It just sounds like a square wave which is what it is. You can record a square wave just as easily as any sinusoidal wave. It's all analog.



    The difference is what the two signals represent.

    Digital data is represented using discrete values: 1/0, on/off...
    It is meant to be interpreted by a machine. I.E. computers, DAC chips...

    Analog is, well, read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_signal
     
    Last edited: Aug 2, 2015
  25. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    As Tyler Eaves pointed out already, vinyl is nothing like a hard drive, apart from the fact both are spinning discs. The closest analog equivalent would be videotape, but the information density on a hard drive is scads higher now than it ever was for videotape. They're recording using vertical stacks of clumps of molecules at this point, and looking to drop down to the molecular level over the next decade or so.
     
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