Vinyl & needle magnified 1000x

Pretty cool


Source
https://twitter.com/MicroscopePics/status/449327614503964672/photo/1

 

That it even works is pretty amazing.

 

I'll be right back, I've gotta go clean my needle.

 

Yea, after seeing that I broke out the 000 grit steel wool and gave it a swirl around the stylus. Works wonders.

Cool pictures though. Thanks for posting those. I think if I had a usb microscope I'd be putzing with it all the time on the table.

 

Boggles my mind.

 

MP3 file
0011010110011101 0011010100011110

 

That is simply amazing....you look at those pictures and it's hard to believe that anything working its way through THAT could produce such lovely results.

 

You would think the whole cartridge would be shaking constantly, but I guess the cantilever absorbs most of the zigs and zags.

 

Name the LP.

I have a Y&B Parlophone Rubber Soul stereo and a Moody Blues Question 45 that have a skip but nothing you can see. I would love to see a picture of them. I'm sure it would be cost prohibitive, but it would be nice to be able to view and laser a skip.

 

Exactly, when you look at a record spinning, and how graceful the cart and needle looks, just gliding through the grooves, you don't imagine the grooves as looking like that. When you wrap your head around it, the cart should be bouncing all over the place and the needle getting ripped off.

 

That's why some cartridges sound better when you remove the plastic shell. It will vibrate at audible frequencies.

jeff

 

Imagine having the aptitude to even think of this in the first place and invent it - genius.

 

Thank you Thomas Edison

 

Well he gave us the cylinder. But I get your point. It is something that never would have occurred to me I can assure you.

 

How this even works as well as it does is pretty amazing, I'm still perplexed as to how the sound from the right and left wall can be split into a proper stereo image without the sound spilling into each other. How is it even possible to cut sounds into vinyl? then retrieve it and listen to it without it sounding like complete gibberish. I guess my question is how does this even work?

 

The labels are wrong, aren't they? If I recall correctly, the shape of the groove itself is the monophonic signal, not Left/Right. The ripples you see on the walls of the groove are the difference between the left and right channel signals. So the mono signal vibrates the needle sideways, while the ripples cause it to vibrate up and down.

 

With magnification like that it's easier to see why a stylus with a larger front-to-back radius will not be able to trace those high-frequency ripples as well as a stylus with a more narrow profile. And you can imagine how a stylus, when it starts to develop flat spots on its sides from wear, will begin chiseling away at the groove walls.

 

With stereo, it's not a simple matter of side-to-side vs. up-and-down. The groove walls are at a 45 degree angle...so it's a combination of sideways movement and vertical movement that produces the sound for each channel. Here is an illustration of the movement of that causes the sound for each channel (note that the illustration is somewhat tilted):


The needle moves in a direction perpendicular from each groove wall. The two directions of movement (illustrated by my green arrows) are 90 degrees from each other, so they are effectively isolated from each other...in the same way that pure lateral movement and pure vertical movement would also be isolated. Since it's possible for the needle to move along both lines of direction at the same time, separate sound for each channel can be produced simultaneously.

There is an elegant simplicity to the process...but it's still amazing that it sounds as good as it does.

 

All these years I have held on to a catalog that I received via US mail waaaay back in 1977 entitled: The Essentials; Specialists In The Audio and Record Care Field.
I think the photos provided by the OP supports information that was printed decades ago, and I quote:

"Always remember that your records are subject to tremendous pressures and forces as they are being played. The tiny diamond stylus tracking at a feather-weight pressure of only 1 1/2 grams will
exert over 5 tons of pressure on the fragile record groove walls. As little as 1/4 gram of added pressure may increase that downward force an additional ton. Any dust and dirt left on the record or in the grooves will easily
be pushed into the groove walls as it passes by.
In spite of what you may think, vinyl is not rigid. It is elastically deformed by these pressures and particles. That's why it is very important to give your records a chance to rest after each playing. Like a rug that has had a lot
of weight on it on one spot, both need time to spring back to their original shapes."

With this in mind...
Many years back my best friend and I (under the influence of a well known [per Hendrix] "mind expander") flipped Fleetwood Mac's recently released Then Play On LP repeatedly (dozens of times) throughout the night
until Dawn broke the darkness.
God only knows the damage we inflicted on that record, but hey, back then, who noticed (or cared)? That was, and will forever be, the most influential music in our memories.

 

I find even more amazing that digital doesn't...

 

Here's one of those pictures without the writing.

The hi-res version is laid out with the appropriate white space to make a perfect 8x10, already formatted for a frame, suitable for display in your listening room. It is in mine.

high res version

 

^^^Thanks.

 

I'd like to see how my tini Audio Technica line-tracking MLX 150 stylus looks at a 1000x.

 

This may be of interest: http://www.recordcollectorsguild.org/index.php?name=Sections&req=viewarticle&artid=8&page=2

Note that this is only page 2 of a four-page article; pages 3 and 4 should also be of interest.

 

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