HD "HI-FI Vinyl Will Soon Be A Reality 3D Printing Technology

Emile Berliner invented the lateral record (as opposed to earlier cylinder) in 1889. Now back your regular thread.

 

You may have missed my point. The record was invented in the 1880s, but it was recorded and played back mechanically. The needle-groove approach was adequate to that. Those were the ones we call "shellac" nowadays and who run at 78 rpm.

In 1948 the modern micro-groove vinyl record was invented in parallel by Columbia and RCA (33and 45 rpm respectively). It uses the same basic approach as shellac disks, but is incompatible with them due to different speeds and groove widths. It was meant to bring the record into the modern era by increasing sound quality and extending playing time over shellac. It did that, but my point was that the mechanical needle-groove approach was outdated even then, because all other components of the playback chain were electronic already.

That means that there have to be two transducers in the chain: The conversion of an electronic to a mechanical signal when cutting the disc, and the conversion back from mechanical to electronic during playback, which we need the cartridge for.

Those are the two weakest point in the entire system, and they decrease fidelity. They could have been avoided if the disc had been done away with in the 1950s. Why jump to a mechanically read medium in the middle when they could have used tape as a distribution format from then on.

 

Tape is also a physical medium, changing the orientation of magnetic particles that are non-uniform on a non-uniform media, and so is any other way you can store sounds.

Sound is not electricity, though. Sound is movement of air. The problem is not the mechanical part - the problem is the electrical part. We need to get back to the days before electric recording and playback. Those discs from 1910 that were recorded by someone pressing start on 10 disc cutters in the same room as the musicians. Cutters that had acoustic diaphragms and horns, and the air movement of the instruments in the studio was all that created the same disc that was played by consumers. Take off the recorded discs, load up new blank platters, and the musicians played again for another batch of records. Then played back as pure as the original on customer's gramophones, where the air movement recorded on the disc is again directly coupled to the air for you to hear.

That will be the new hipster way of getting "analog". Forget these HD vinyls that are fake analog created on digital workstations and emailed to the pressing plant.

Seriously though, digital doesn't care if you record it on a spinning disc with lasers, on a tape, hard drive or memory chips, or even with a stylus on a disc. Digital is the future now. When there are no errors, it is the same audio that the digital recorder captured in the studio, played back in your home. Vinyl's "comeback" is ponderous.

 

Pardon my ignorance but, if a so-called HD disk is to have 30% greater capacity, are we to believe that the styli used on today's vinyl will still physically play these disks pand get the most from them? Disks at 25 minutes per side already cause playback issues as the storage/playback limit is approached. Smacks of yet another fleecing exercise to me - or is it April 1st already? HD sunglasses anyone?!

 

The article linked by the OP says

“We adjust the distance of the grooves, we correct the radial/tangential errors, and we optimize the frequencies,” Loibl continued. “You could say we ‘master’ the topographical data, which is a totally different approach.”​

This is very vague, but I'd interpret it to mean that they cleverly optimise groove spacings and displacements using a computer software which processes an entire record side at a time before cutting it, err I mean 3D printing it. Of course that optimisation has always been done, but maybe not to the theoretical maximum because the conventional method can only "see" one rotation ahead, so there might still be room for improvement. Otherwhise it's a conventional vinyl record compatible with all existing players. Not a new format, just a different recording method to produce an existing format, so no worry.

 

I thought conventional cutters were already computer controlled and looked ahead more than a single groove. If not they should be - there's nothing to prevent a computer controlled cutting head from taking advantage of the same sort of processing.

 

“Optimize the frequencies” sounds suspiciously like storage compression achieved through psychoacoustic modeling.

 

Yes, and they've been for over 50 years too. Neumann has had this technology working well since the Neumann SX 68 cutting system back since 1968 or so. And how can HD HiFi vinyl defy the laws of vinyl cutting physics here?. I don't think it can't. These people aren't Neumann or Ortofon or Westrex, I suspect these 3D printers do not have a track record in this industry or any expertise in mastering records. If they do, I'd like to know that they have expertise in this field. It would make me more likely to feel like they might be on to something. For me, the ultimate test is would be what Kevin Gray and our host would think about this technology. I'm trying to post these words as the voice of reason.

 

Promising "30% more capacity" is rather unambitious. In the 1970s, a French company called MDR invented "Trimicron", which completely removed the gap between the grooves, allowing almost two hours of music to be put onto a single LP record:

 

Which was like what K-Tel and others did. Tracking also tends to be more problematic, with grooves too close to each other. Which meant volume level and bass level suffered. You can't have something for nothing. Want more playing time, volume and bass levels get sacrificed. Surface noise issues get very exacerbated. Laws of physics of vinyl mastering. With most pop/rock material, 18:00 a side is optimal length for average musical material.

 

Yeah but that's digital too

 

I wonder why that never caught on. Guessing it's because the records would be incredibly fragile and more difficult to mass-produce.

Here's a question - why are we still pressing records out of vinyl? Surely material science has advanced considerably since the 1940's. There have to be better materials you could make a record out of.

 

because it is a niche market people will never expect changes it so sad.

 

Well the simplest answer could be that even in the heyday of vinyl they looked for better formulations/materials and found none.

But if you think about it, vinyl was pretty much written off as dead for a very long time and hence no one would've been thinking about new materials to use. It's been given a new lease on life now but I don't think anyone is interested in spending money on finding new material to use.

 

What countries would that be? Except for DJing music (house, techno, hiphop &cet) vinyl was pretty much dead between 1995 and 2010ish, I dare say worldwide.

 

Here's the interview with Rebeat by Michael Fremer regarding "HD Vinyl."

 

Thank you @nosliw. That's an interesting video, he's actually talking business. Here's the interesting facts I gathered:

• It's not 3D printing but etching a stamper using a laser, from which the actual records will be pressed in the conventional way.
• As the entire record surface is computer generated, they can do several things that used to be physically impossible so far, such as:
• Doing away with tracking angle errors by creating the groove as if it was cut with a radially cutting head that moves across the surface like the majority of domestic tonearms. There will however be an error with linear tracking tonearms, who in turn have no angle error with traditional records. As an owner of a liner tracking turntable I object to this . But they have a choice to do either.
• They can cut the the record 30% louder or longer, but not both at the same time.
• They can have a frequency range of up to 100 kHz and a dynamic range of up to 80 dB. This is believable at first glance, as they've done away with the physical limitations of the cutting head. However the limitations of the vinyl record remain in place at the playback end, so that's still not what you'll get at home, analogue purists
• He claims that the groove shape will be optimised such that an appropriate stylus will be in full contact with the groove, instead of just in two small points as in conventional records. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, but he claims it.
• The pressing plant they're using is GZ media in Czech Republic

All very interesting and makes technical sense, except that vinyl remains an obsolete format.

 

So it's like a modern version of Dynagroove, which also employed computers to modify the record groove, and used tracing compensation to cancel out the distortion of a typical tonearm and stylus... in 1963.

Dynagroove - Wikipedia

 

I'm surprised nobody has cooked up an audiophile analog format based on Blu-ray technology. It would be fairly inexpensive to develop at this point, could recycle a ton of existing tech and equipment, and would blow every other analog format out of the water. I mean, if you're gonna have a fetish, might as well go whole hog...

 

An analog audio/video format that uses a laser instead of a stylus? We had that, in 1978. It's called LaserDisc.

 

Well exactly, it's old tech now, though a 12" monster disc ain't exactly convienent (and nobody is setup to manufacture them anymore).

Whereas in theory an analog disc that used Blu-ray tech could exploit a lot of currently-available equipment.

 

Vwest: Thanks so much for posting that. Getting Leonard Nimoy to do the commercial was sheer genius.

 

Why using Blu ray technology? CD is capable of storing 44.1 Khz frequencies. If it's on the replication disc end, then I'm in, I've never seen a more resistent and robust coating as the one used on the reading side of BD's (Durabys is it called and developed by TDK?), I'd like to know how they got it. I'd use it as a plus for manufacturing CDs too.

 

Because if you wanted a truly high-fidelity yet convienent analog format, you'd need something capable of the bandwidth Blu-ray discs possess. And also because it would allow you to likely reuse a lot of Blu-ray technology, which would dramatically lower costs. In theory you should even be able to make combo players that could handle Blu-ray discs or these new "Blu-log" discs...

 

Don't forget that the old laserdisk format used most of its bandwidth for video. An audio-only version with the same playing time and audio fidelity using the same laser wavelength would be much smaller. Laserdisk came in two sub-formats: analogue video+ analogue audio, or analogue video + digital audio. The analogue audio one used FM subcarriers for the audio portion. According to wikipedia its fidelity wasn't so great, but even if you say quadruple bandwidth and SNR, a blue laser approach would probably yield many hours of playing time.

Also I'm not sure it could be done that cheaply. Everything in the existing manufacturing process of BluRay (and DVD and CD) disks and players assumes the signal is digital. For analogue signals, many of the steps would require re-engineering.