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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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
> 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.
“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.
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.
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:
focused around things like laser engraving and phonograph records made of durable materials such that people would be able to read them with whatever technology we have in the future.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always loved the story of the "three-sided" Monty Python record, where the B side had two parallel concentric grooves, causing different tracks to play depending on where the needle was dropped. I always wondered what kind of equipment went into producing it.
From what I know about record manufacturing, creating the lacquer master would involve adjusting the angle of the groove to allow for two concentric grooves to be laid, along with some care in creating that master. But once it’s done, the manufacturing process is handled through a stamping process (so a vinyl record isn’t cut, it’s pressed with a metal die that’s created from the lacquer master through electroplating).
You’d cut it normal equipment, with very wide groove spacing. Start the two grooves 180 degrees out of phase. They’ll never intersect.
You could do it with more than two grooves, just to having them at 360/n degrees apart. You’ll just have to make the groove spacing wider as the number of tracks go off. Of course that comes at the cost of playback tine.
When I was a kid, we had a "record producer" board game and the randomizer was a 45rpm record with three concentric grooves. You did a needle drop and it said It's a Hit, It's a Flop, or Break Even.
De La Soul's 12" Single for "Me Myself And I" also has its second side cut with two grooves. The hype sticker says, "3 Sides." Each time you put the needle down you have a 50/50 chance to hear the song you're trying to hear. :-)
The same goes for the 1994 first pressing of Marillion's Brave.
Side 4 has a double groove, which would give you either The Great Escape + Made again (a sort of a happy ending) or The Great Escape + 20 minutes of water sounds (which can be interpreted as the sad ending).
In a world of digital rationality, I’m glad teenage engineering are here to design the absurd and analog. It doesn’t make rational sense - and I think that’s the point
This is fantastic. There is a shortage of places that can press vinyl, making it very difficult to start an indy label. Vinyl (believe it or not) is going up in sales, many young people want to own a physical product of music, even if they don't have turntables. It's a way to support acts. Selling vinyl is thus one of the ways indy acts and labels can actually make money.
Is there a performative and marketing element? sure. But that's the music world, a great deal is performative. We have depended on patrons who want to support the arts and be seen supporting the arts for time immemorial.
This isn't a press, it's a cutter. It's used to make vinyl masters, which are then used to create a mold for pressing. This device will only make discs slowly, one at a time. You would still need a bunch more machinery to press a quantity of discs. However, a vinyl master, although it has a limited playback life, is the best vinyl sound you're gonna get.
The Gakken toy record cutter was only 8000 yen when it was released[0].
My spouse bought one on a whim. The quality is ... quite bad. It's a tool for learning about how this works though! So it was a fun little activity. But it really is "just" what it is.
Maybe Teenage Engineering's toy that looks like is exactly the same tech is better. I have my doubts.
The two groove cutters(?) on the APC-2 look like the weigh more than that toy cutter. It is interesting that this prints in realtime is that a toy thing?
Originally lathe cuts were used by producers in electronic genres namely jungle/DnB as a way to test yet unreleased tracks on the dance floor. Those records were created in very low numbers and could only survive a handful of plays. As stated here in the comments, producing such records requires a great amount of skill and understanding of the process, as well as understanding the way tracks translate to physical media. TE here again does a great amount of art-washing and Supreme-isation of previously "niche" things for the audience that treats music culture as a costume. A great toy for average Rick Rubin book enjoyer.
Dinsynch makes an “acoustic lathe” for a little less than $2k. It doesn’t look nearly as cool as the TE setup but will probably be similar in execution and quality.
Actual transcription lathes will be much more expensive and I think can record on better material. Those can be used for direct to disc recording production. I’m not sure if what TE and Dinsync offer can make something that can be used for production.
Unrelated, but related - if you want to have 1 record made, reach out to https://recordcut.com/
Their hours are "2:30 PM to 12 Midnight", I sort of believe... 7 days a week?
Rich will actually answer the phone, and guide you. I've done it a few times (it's an incredibly cool gift). A single record is $12. Extremely worth experiencing it.
id pay to watch mkbhd(or similar) review the apc-2. and compare one made on apc-2 to someone like recordcut(or similar). that said. im glad companies like teenage are catering to the whimsy. because why not. im sure it will sell out. and they will stop producing it after they have scratched the itch of wanting to create a product like it. and hopefully after that we can get our hands on the un-redacted files.
I think it's cool that they make stuff like this. It's refreshing to see something engineered for the sake of being beautiful and cool, instead of worrying about BOM cost and margin.
Not even a price listed. I don't understand the market for this - fancy musical instruments for creativity, sure, there's a market, but who wants to own cutting vinyl? How many records would you need to make for this to be more economical than paying a dedicated shop? How many would you need to do to "achieve higher quality"? How consistent are your results?
This isn't that but their "record factory" toy[0]... I'm like 90% sure is the same thing as something Gakken released in Japan for half the price as a little fun toy[1]
Even in the age of the internet there's a huge business in people basically taking a "normal" thing from another market and then rebadging it to release as an elevated thing.
Studio neat has a $231 tiny box cutter[2]. OLFA (A "professional" box cutter maker) sells a 2 pack of tiny box cutters that probably are 5x more ergonomic on account of being made to be used instead of to look nice on a website, for $10. [3]
The best version of a thing is likely whatever people who do it all day use. But you can totally make a market for consumers who want "fashionable" things but who don't really get the space.
Studio Neat is a big offender on this honestly... basically all of their stuff have "better" things at least at half the cost just available in random stationary stores. I'm all for wasting money on pens, but at least waste them on good pens!
The best box cutter is the Moby Safety Knife. I used it when I was working in a supermarket 20 years ago, and I haven't found anything even remotely comparable.
The short blade on top is perfect for breaking the tape to open the box without damaging the contents. Then the mouth can be used for quickly breaking down boxes or cutting shrink wrap. You are just cutting tape, so the blade never wears out.
I cringe every time I see someone using a Stanley knife in a supermarket.
I learned about the Pacific Handy Cutter from my local grocer. It's cheap and excellent. It has a dull edge for 95% of tape cutting needs, and a safety guide for when you need to use the blade. Admittedly, it's not useful for slicing up / cutting down boxes.
This model is right handed, but they make a lefty too.
That used to be $95 at launch, which still is very expensive of course, but slightly more palatable. I wonder if the current price is due to tariffs perhaps?
That fancy box cutter looks high utility; what don't you like about it besides the price? The retraction seems designed for frequently opening boxes, but not constantly. (I open few boxes and have a bog standard box cutter; I haven't used Studio Neat's or OLFA.)
If you are frequently opening boxes, that spring-loaded mechanism is going to cause repetitive stress injuries. No competent workplace health and safety employee would approve it.
Also, if you are using a utility knife frequently, you likely have a depth you want to keep it. Say I’m installing carpeting. I want to set the razor at a depth for the shag of carpet I’m working on today and have my blade at that depth until I’m done. With a spring load, the only depth that can easily be set is fully out where I’m pushing it all the way. Any intermediate depths will result in me shaking back and forth trying to hold a constant intermediate pressure.
This is a utility knife for someone rich who uses it for the day’s amazons packages because they think using the blade from their scissors is beneath them.
Maybe frequently was the wrong word; I would think spring-loaded would be designed for a lot of cycling between quick cuts and some other tasks, and you didn't want to leave the blade open.
Fixed blade would be best if you were constantly opening boxes and/or you could set your knife down open. And yes, for doing tasks where you are doing longer or more strenuous cutting (carpet is a great example.)
They money is fun to grouse about, but I thought the complaint about the low utility was the interesting bit.
The OLFA small box cutter is more ergonomic, does the job, and costs 100x less so you could buy a 10 pack of em and put them everywhere you want one.
Other people have linked serious box cutters for "I need to use a box cutter on 100 boxes" cases, and OLFA's small box cutter will work well for a bunch of other stuff (OLFA also has like 20 other form factors all at reasonable prices).
The other nice feature is using standard utility blades.
I have several Stanley type box cutters and blade retraction is an infuriating experience on each one because it gets stuck, the lock button gets stuck, it doesn't slide properly, often doesn't click into place, etc. I can definitely see the appeal of an object that is actually designed to work properly.
I'm confused because over the past 20 years I've owned four Stanleys[1] and used many more and never had those problems. Are you using the absolute cheapest ones they make? Because even the ones you get at Home Depot these days have metal innards that hold up over time.
One of mine got left outside in the garden for an entire winter. One side of the enclosure is sun bleached and I had to replace the blade, but otherwise it still gets used every week and works fine.
For what it’s worth, a non-locking blade is a plus for some people. I wouldn’t really want to leave a locking box cutter around, I’m too forgetful, but one that stows itself away automatically I’d feel a bit safer about. Still a silly price, though.
Teenage Engineering seems to run partly on hype and halo effect. It makes cool things you can’t afford, and you buy something cheaper. Selling a vinyl cutting machine keeps them in the news, which keeps them in your mind, and then you think about how you always wanted an OP-1 but oh maybe you could buy the EP-133 instead.
I’m sure there’s a price at which the vinyl cutter is profitable.
It's also possible that TE are full of people who are passionate about design and sound and want to work on and release interesting products in that space. Not everything is a psyop
That took my comment to a much darker place than I anticipated—I think basic marketing is ok, and even if you’re passionate about design, you still should be thinking about the business’s bottom line.
...if only they were at least somewhat as passionate about QC.
It really pains me to be that cynical, because I do find their products incredibly fascinating and inventive. But for anything but their lowest-end toy products the design aspirations - and boutique price tag - clash hard with the reality of their quality track record.
They're passionate about style and brand, not design and sound.
I say this as someone with expertise in a domain they nominally targetted.
Very "cool" looking kit, but: missing basic features, unremarkable in those provided; serious issues rendering it fundamentally inappropriate for its nominal application.
There is one company that sells similar lathe cutters in Europe. To aquire it you need to go on a multi day training in a remote Swiss forest. Then it’s around 10.000 EUR in equipment, granted you supply your own record player (sl1200 ~700EUR). But yeah cutting high quality stereo records is an art. No matter the money you throw at it, it will involve a lot of maintenance, skill, experience, spare parts, mastering skills, consumables, and time (these cut in real time). Indeed, who wants to do that? I welcome any effort in this niche though!
Consistency is super hard to achieve if you are not cutting daily in a (climate) controlled environment, even then, you will burn out the cutting head transducers, your cutting heads will dull (super fast). Operational costs are pretty high. Wonder how much they will charge for this lathe. I guess 40-80k USD?
I have a real “I was born yesterday” feeling having realized that “Teenage Engineering” has nothing to do with making audio tech accessible to young newcomers.
There’s certainly novelty to this, I’d love one if the price were reasonable. Direct capture, almost like a polaroid for vinyl records, no need to “develop” it.
I imagine artists could sell a super-limited (i.e. 1 copy) live recording of a show the second it ends for a premium, especially if they kept the machine on stage and personally packaged and signed it.
There used to be places where you could make your own one-of-a-kind record: pretty much direct microphone to vinyl¹ which I’m guessing this essentially is. But that said, I kind of feel like most of Teenage Engineering is more stunt than practical.
⸻
1. A booth for making records like this plays a role in the plot of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Elvis Presley’s very first recordings were a similar thing, the two sides recorded in a booth to make a singular record to give his mother as a present in 1953.
Might I introduce you to the concept of dub plates? I absolutely love playing vinyl as a dj, and being able to cut my own would be worth it to me. Some people are just silly about their hobbies even without going into lalaland like an audiophile. Growing up, my dad had an 8-track recorder and a box of blank cassettes. I would record my music to them as the car I drove still had an 8-track player. It's goofy. It's fun. It's not logical per se, but it's also not hurting you. So leave me to my idiosyncrasies and go back to your Spotify feed and obey and consume as you do
Producing a lathe cut is the first (physical) step of many of pressing vinyl.
This isn’t targeting consumers, or even record stores, but record pressing plants.
This is kind of a big deal because this sort of fundamental equipment hasn’t been available new for decades. The vast majority of plants/mastering facilities are using old Scully lathes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Those are getting ever older and harder to source parts for, and with the vinyl boom the number of pressing plants is actually going up.
Back when I DJ'd techno in the 90s I would have killed for this for what it could bring creatively to a set. Just the ability to cut my own tracks onto white labels and put custom loops etc on vinyl would have really changed things entirely without having to front a whole bunch of cash (which I def did not have) to get a batch of records pressed which probably nobody else would order or play.
But now mixing is done digitally and playing with vinyl is a mostly lost art and it's trivial to put your own material together into audio files and mix it.
I've heard tales of Ritchie Hawtin playing multiple turntables (6-8 depending on who's telling) where he'd have tracks separated as stems into dub plates and do live remixes by swapping out the plates. The things people did before Ableton!
I saw him do 3... maybe 4? tables? But mostly 2 or 3 decks plus a 909.
Around here in Toronto area we had a local (Jeff Milligan / "Algorithm") who was famous for absolutely precise beatmatching, and often 4 deck mixing. Very minimal wonky/bleepy techno.
Market: music industry veterans that won the race and have boutique record labels for small runs of obscure or promotional or small bands. Have five records printed for the merch table and the next show. Once you have the machine hopefully the marginal cost of a record would make sense for extremely small runs.
Where a band with no money might struggle to afford a $1000 minimum run somewhere else, they might be able to make beer money at a show with records made on one of these. Probably not "economical" in the machine may never pay for itself, but somebody rich buying one as a mechanism to promote musicians on a small scale probably makes sense to them.
I remember to listening to some in my childhood and never understood why the tech was not the standard (relative to the brittle cumbersome vinyls). Maybe the sound quality is worse. Unsure
Because brittle really is a second name for Flexi disc. They have shallower groove which means limited dynamic range, higher hiss/surface noise/distortion, plus because they are so light they often don't sit flat on a turntable so welcome speed variations aka "wow and flutter" and frequent skipping. You could listen 500-1000 times to normal vinyl before any audible degradation and the same may happen to Flexi disc after 5 or 10 times.
Flexi discs were cool inserts for some home computer magazines; you'd dub the flexi disc to music cassette, and the noise and beeps were computer programs for your home computer.
I remember our home stereo in the 1970s had a rubber non-slip-matt with concentric grooves in it, often flexi-discs were so flexi that that the needle would follow the groove on the other side instead of the one on the disc. They were almost unplayable on that unless you set the tonearm counter-weights to as light as possible.
That built-in obsolescence was often the point of flexi-discs as they were typically used as giveaways in magazines with the goal of promoting the artist - the faster it wears out, the sooner the consumer is likely to go purchase the real thing.
Isn't marketing wonderful. Who cares what the motor shaft is made of? (and why not ordinary steel? tungsten just sounds cooler? they want to reuse it for a lightbulb filament later?)
Tungsten will certainly isolate better than other softer metals. The entire product is centred around embedding vibrations into a physical object. The material that is used to transfer or isolate those vibrations is important especially at signal levels used in lathe cutting.
Aren't vinyls typically pressed, not carved from a blank? I wonder how accurate they can actually get if they have to carve every notch into the groove.
It appears they’ll just rebrand a few record cutters and call it a product. TE always comes off as really low quality for the types of prices they charge.
The MPC Sample is 400$ and looks well built, the KO2 is 300$ and has faders falling off.
Roland has a few samplers in the same price range as well.
Audio file to gcode is not difficult. Here's a record laser cut into a tortilla [0].
I once tried to mill one out of MDF on a CNC machine [1]. It didn't sound very good, but better than I expected.
3D printing one seems very difficult, since 3D printers build walls instead of cut grooves. Maybe you could play it if you had some kind of bifurcated needle? Anyways, it's enough of a joke that it probably wouldn't work well that it was a Prusa April fools joke [2].
A better printer, maybe a resin one, can do it [3].
Most 3D prints are vinyls already! the surface encodes some patterns of the motor movements and medium curing process. Shame it wouldn’t sound very good and there’s no machine to play them.
I looked and went, "WTF is that? Looks like a record cutting machine"
Scrolled down
WTAF
I'm a total TE fanboi, I have the OP1F and OP-XY, they're everything I ever wanted and my MPC and Digitakt haven't be touched in months. And the Digitone Keys is unplugged propped against the bookshelf. It's extraordinary how addictive these two little synths are for making things happen.
The APC-2, however, is a fascinating outcome of what happens when you have a bunch of creative people who like - and can - do things that are new to them and make them new to others. It's no wonder they keep getting asked to do cool stuff like Panic's Playdate, Baidu's Raven, Nothing Smartphones and Headphones.
TE have retained this incredible playful vibe that has long drained from Sony and Apple.
I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.
"God, I'm good," thought the Rolex wearer as he glanced at his wrist.
Hipsters will buy anything that looks cool. But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.
> I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.
Nobody pretends that high-end watches are anything besides objets d'art and even then not every watch is a Rolex synonymous with conspicuous consumption. TE, on the other hand, has legions of fans that buy this stuff without knowing the first thing about music production just because they think it's cool and want to try it out. Nobody who buys a $700 Tissot thinks it tells better time than a $17 Casio.
I have no problem with any of this. The world needs more aspiring creatives and it's none of my business how these consumers choose to spend their money. The fact that you find it appropriate to unilaterally shit on people who have nice watches while being in possession of a $2000 groovebox is, however, as the kids say, "a choice."
I'd guess there's a very high chance someone wearing an Aquanaut is having a better time than someone wearing a $700 Tissot or a $17 Casio, less of a difference between the latter two.
It's not telling better time, it's telling of a better time.
That's very much not how it works. Musk and Trump are absolutely miserable despite having effectively infinite wealth and power. Not that either of them have the taste to wear an Aquanaut, mind.
Do you accept everything? Are you enthusiastic for scammers that prey on rich sycophants?
The parent comment is right. Their logic is cyclical, they acknowledge that Teenage Engineering is widely accepted to be overpriced hipster crap, and then refuse to defend their conclusion that it's not made for the hipster audience. They do not posit what their "amazing inventions" are, or qualify their justification for buying two (!!!) OP-1 models, or link to the music that could only be made with the OP-1. They are responding to marketing, which is not a healthy habit of consumption in any market. For musicians, it's called Gear Acquisition Syndrome (chronic GAS).
In essence, you are criticizing someone for challenging a rich snake-oil customer.
> But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.
How anyone tells themselves this while buying Teenage Engineering gear is beyond me. The closest TE came to an "amazing invention" was the OP-Z, and that flopped like a fish on land. The whole business is a marketing-saturated DAWless hipster fantasy, hook line and sinker.
I was there when my properly talented musician friends bought the original OP-1, and I was also there when they sold it to afford a better MIDI controller. It's a Fischer-Price 4-track recorder, there's a very good reason you don't see your favorite musicians dailying it.
The OP-Z was an absolute mess! That thinkpad bullshit they used to mold it from had curing issues that they never quite sorted out. Had one from the first run, wouldn't stay on or charge without a vice grip. They sent another one that also was not square/did not sit flat and suffers from intermittent shorts, attempting to use the pressure sensitive top button is a coinflip on it turning off. It's also quite colorblind-hostile, and is impossible to use outside or under bright stage lights. Needing an app to manage it was such a dumb choice. It definitely had some neat pre-MIDI 2.0 ideas but in practice most of what it offers is better handled further up the chain.
The OP-1 (and TX-6) on the other hand are excellent, I have 3 of them and love them dearly! Plenty of producers and bands still use them to great effect, the used price is evidence of this. Treating it as a controller is a pretty solid sign you've missed the point. Most midi devices are not able to cope with the bpm/playback speed shifting in response to the tape interactions (which is fully in spec). I did appreciate people offloading them for cheap.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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. :-)
I still wonder if the circuitry was analog or digital, though. That could have been an analog "computer".
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
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.
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.
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.
I was talking about modern mastering, not what had been done back in the analog era when digital media had first been introduced.
What’s your current process for discovering new music?
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.
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.
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.
(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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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...
Also it can be "read" non intrusively with a laser-pickup, like a CD, without wearing the medium down.
It works and sounds like a good idea but boy do lasers see dust spots and things like that.
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
Archival optical media is likely much better than any kind of open groove technology.
I dunno if Blu-Ray players are going to exist 100 or 1000 years from now, but it could be very challenging to recreate them.
On the other hand you can play a phonograph record by sticking your fingernail into the groove!
The Church of Scientology has done a lot of work towards preservation of the (worthless!) works of L. Ron Hubbard
https://www.colinsjamjar.com/p/scientologists-jumpstarted-th...
focused around things like laser engraving and phonograph records made of durable materials such that people would be able to read them with whatever technology we have in the future.
Vinyl is not great for archiving. It degrades and is affected by dust.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's bad, according to your definition of what good is.
I enjoy all those things you've listed as bad :shrug:
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.
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.
I always loved the story of the "three-sided" Monty Python record, where the B side had two parallel concentric grooves, causing different tracks to play depending on where the needle was dropped. I always wondered what kind of equipment went into producing it.
From what I know about record manufacturing, creating the lacquer master would involve adjusting the angle of the groove to allow for two concentric grooves to be laid, along with some care in creating that master. But once it’s done, the manufacturing process is handled through a stamping process (so a vinyl record isn’t cut, it’s pressed with a metal die that’s created from the lacquer master through electroplating).
You’d cut it normal equipment, with very wide groove spacing. Start the two grooves 180 degrees out of phase. They’ll never intersect.
You could do it with more than two grooves, just to having them at 360/n degrees apart. You’ll just have to make the groove spacing wider as the number of tracks go off. Of course that comes at the cost of playback tine.
A Porky prime cut.
When I was a kid, we had a "record producer" board game and the randomizer was a 45rpm record with three concentric grooves. You did a needle drop and it said It's a Hit, It's a Flop, or Break Even.
EDIT- Apparently it was the K-Tel Superstar game
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4521/k-tel-superstar-gam...
De La Soul's 12" Single for "Me Myself And I" also has its second side cut with two grooves. The hype sticker says, "3 Sides." Each time you put the needle down you have a 50/50 chance to hear the song you're trying to hear. :-)
https://www.discogs.com/master/19554-De-La-Soul-Me-Myself-An...
The same goes for the 1994 first pressing of Marillion's Brave.
Side 4 has a double groove, which would give you either The Great Escape + Made again (a sort of a happy ending) or The Great Escape + 20 minutes of water sounds (which can be interpreted as the sad ending).
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(Marillion_album)#Vinyl_... (I also have a copy and can confirm indeed it works like that).
Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief Executive Version.
I bought a Record Store Day release of Ella Fitzgerald live in Berlin that did this around 2020. Very cool stuff.
Jack White did something similar with Lazaretto.
In a world of digital rationality, I’m glad teenage engineering are here to design the absurd and analog. It doesn’t make rational sense - and I think that’s the point
Sometimes it is nice to have one thing that does its one job extremely well.
This is fantastic. There is a shortage of places that can press vinyl, making it very difficult to start an indy label. Vinyl (believe it or not) is going up in sales, many young people want to own a physical product of music, even if they don't have turntables. It's a way to support acts. Selling vinyl is thus one of the ways indy acts and labels can actually make money.
Is there a performative and marketing element? sure. But that's the music world, a great deal is performative. We have depended on patrons who want to support the arts and be seen supporting the arts for time immemorial.
You could just sell old vinyl with new labels and sleeves and they would be none the wiser.
This isn't a press, it's a cutter. It's used to make vinyl masters, which are then used to create a mold for pressing. This device will only make discs slowly, one at a time. You would still need a bunch more machinery to press a quantity of discs. However, a vinyl master, although it has a limited playback life, is the best vinyl sound you're gonna get.
A lot of fans don't own a player, and just want to collect cool cover art. =3
our shared vision is to enable access to anyone who wants their music or sound on a physical record.
FWIW, You can get 100 records + jackets printed professionally for ~$10 a pop.
Gakken toy record cutter is low quality, but costs $160.
I wonder what this would cost. Surely it's impractical for personal use, as marketed.
The Gakken toy record cutter was only 8000 yen when it was released[0].
My spouse bought one on a whim. The quality is ... quite bad. It's a tool for learning about how this works though! So it was a fun little activity. But it really is "just" what it is.
Maybe Teenage Engineering's toy that looks like is exactly the same tech is better. I have my doubts.
[0]: https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200
The two groove cutters(?) on the APC-2 look like the weigh more than that toy cutter. It is interesting that this prints in realtime is that a toy thing?
Yeah that copy doesn’t line up with the reality of the pricing or production run of this thing at all.
Cool project but the opposite of democratization.
Shipping is making things prohibitively expensive in many parts of the world
Originally lathe cuts were used by producers in electronic genres namely jungle/DnB as a way to test yet unreleased tracks on the dance floor. Those records were created in very low numbers and could only survive a handful of plays. As stated here in the comments, producing such records requires a great amount of skill and understanding of the process, as well as understanding the way tracks translate to physical media. TE here again does a great amount of art-washing and Supreme-isation of previously "niche" things for the audience that treats music culture as a costume. A great toy for average Rick Rubin book enjoyer.
...and here's a great documentary about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
This is a video about Amen Break, read from a wax disc which can't survive more than 5-6 plays.
Dinsynch makes an “acoustic lathe” for a little less than $2k. It doesn’t look nearly as cool as the TE setup but will probably be similar in execution and quality.
https://youtu.be/udQC04YrXq0
Actual transcription lathes will be much more expensive and I think can record on better material. Those can be used for direct to disc recording production. I’m not sure if what TE and Dinsync offer can make something that can be used for production.
Unrelated, but related - if you want to have 1 record made, reach out to https://recordcut.com/
Their hours are "2:30 PM to 12 Midnight", I sort of believe... 7 days a week?
Rich will actually answer the phone, and guide you. I've done it a few times (it's an incredibly cool gift). A single record is $12. Extremely worth experiencing it.
Similarly if you're in Europe I recommend:
https://drdub.com/en/faq/
I've done it twice and had a great experience, although in the 10X pricing range compared to recordcut.com.
I've used https://www.online-druck.biz/lp-cover.html for the sleeve, but I don't know if they ship internationally.
I need to remember this when I buy gifts
ooh, this seems super cool. i see that he doesn't print jackets, have you gotten them printed elsewhere for that?
yeah, I glued the jacket together - but no, I didn't get it printed professionally. that's a great thought!
id pay to watch mkbhd(or similar) review the apc-2. and compare one made on apc-2 to someone like recordcut(or similar). that said. im glad companies like teenage are catering to the whimsy. because why not. im sure it will sell out. and they will stop producing it after they have scratched the itch of wanting to create a product like it. and hopefully after that we can get our hands on the un-redacted files.
Why would you pay for a review from a smartphone reviewer who likely has never listened to Vinyl?
Shill fetish
Don't think of Teenage Engineering as a device product company. Think of them as a device art company. Suddenly it makes sense.
So, Apple until the M chips?
Apple is a consumer company selling device art. Teenage engineering is a device art company selling consumer products.
I think it's cool that they make stuff like this. It's refreshing to see something engineered for the sake of being beautiful and cool, instead of worrying about BOM cost and margin.
Thought cool; clicked on the link; saw it was Teenage Engineering; and closed the tab.
Their track record consists of vastly overpriced and under-functioning products.
Every Teenage Engineering Product:
Damn I would buy this for 50 bucks.
I actually have a project that requires a bunch of custom vinyl, but I am guessing this is not economical.
Not even a price listed. I don't understand the market for this - fancy musical instruments for creativity, sure, there's a market, but who wants to own cutting vinyl? How many records would you need to make for this to be more economical than paying a dedicated shop? How many would you need to do to "achieve higher quality"? How consistent are your results?
This isn't that but their "record factory" toy[0]... I'm like 90% sure is the same thing as something Gakken released in Japan for half the price as a little fun toy[1]
Even in the age of the internet there's a huge business in people basically taking a "normal" thing from another market and then rebadging it to release as an elevated thing.
Studio neat has a $231 tiny box cutter[2]. OLFA (A "professional" box cutter maker) sells a 2 pack of tiny box cutters that probably are 5x more ergonomic on account of being made to be used instead of to look nice on a website, for $10. [3]
The best version of a thing is likely whatever people who do it all day use. But you can totally make a market for consumers who want "fashionable" things but who don't really get the space.
Studio Neat is a big offender on this honestly... basically all of their stuff have "better" things at least at half the cost just available in random stationary stores. I'm all for wasting money on pens, but at least waste them on good pens!
[0]: https://teenage.engineering/products/po-80
[1]: https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200
[2]: https://www.studioneat.com/products/keen
[3]: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/OLFA-Compact-Knife-Pieces-95B2...
The best box cutter is the Moby Safety Knife. I used it when I was working in a supermarket 20 years ago, and I haven't found anything even remotely comparable.
The short blade on top is perfect for breaking the tape to open the box without damaging the contents. Then the mouth can be used for quickly breaking down boxes or cutting shrink wrap. You are just cutting tape, so the blade never wears out.
I cringe every time I see someone using a Stanley knife in a supermarket.
https://www.safeknife.com/
I learned about the Pacific Handy Cutter from my local grocer. It's cheap and excellent. It has a dull edge for 95% of tape cutting needs, and a safety guide for when you need to use the blade. Admittedly, it's not useful for slicing up / cutting down boxes.
This model is right handed, but they make a lefty too.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HXLNCMM
I remember someone talking about their $100 box cutter and thinking, huh? I just use my keys.
That used to be $95 at launch, which still is very expensive of course, but slightly more palatable. I wonder if the current price is due to tariffs perhaps?
That fancy box cutter looks high utility; what don't you like about it besides the price? The retraction seems designed for frequently opening boxes, but not constantly. (I open few boxes and have a bog standard box cutter; I haven't used Studio Neat's or OLFA.)
> frequently opening boxes, but not constantly.
If you are frequently opening boxes, that spring-loaded mechanism is going to cause repetitive stress injuries. No competent workplace health and safety employee would approve it.
Also, if you are using a utility knife frequently, you likely have a depth you want to keep it. Say I’m installing carpeting. I want to set the razor at a depth for the shag of carpet I’m working on today and have my blade at that depth until I’m done. With a spring load, the only depth that can easily be set is fully out where I’m pushing it all the way. Any intermediate depths will result in me shaking back and forth trying to hold a constant intermediate pressure.
This is a utility knife for someone rich who uses it for the day’s amazons packages because they think using the blade from their scissors is beneath them.
Maybe frequently was the wrong word; I would think spring-loaded would be designed for a lot of cycling between quick cuts and some other tasks, and you didn't want to leave the blade open.
Fixed blade would be best if you were constantly opening boxes and/or you could set your knife down open. And yes, for doing tasks where you are doing longer or more strenuous cutting (carpet is a great example.)
They money is fun to grouse about, but I thought the complaint about the low utility was the interesting bit.
The OLFA small box cutter is more ergonomic, does the job, and costs 100x less so you could buy a 10 pack of em and put them everywhere you want one.
Other people have linked serious box cutters for "I need to use a box cutter on 100 boxes" cases, and OLFA's small box cutter will work well for a bunch of other stuff (OLFA also has like 20 other form factors all at reasonable prices).
Looks good for light-duty uses. Scared for my fingers for anything heavy.
The other nice feature is using standard utility blades.
I have several Stanley type box cutters and blade retraction is an infuriating experience on each one because it gets stuck, the lock button gets stuck, it doesn't slide properly, often doesn't click into place, etc. I can definitely see the appeal of an object that is actually designed to work properly.
I'm confused because over the past 20 years I've owned four Stanleys[1] and used many more and never had those problems. Are you using the absolute cheapest ones they make? Because even the ones you get at Home Depot these days have metal innards that hold up over time.
One of mine got left outside in the garden for an entire winter. One side of the enclosure is sun bleached and I had to replace the blade, but otherwise it still gets used every week and works fine.
[1] This one. None of them have ever failed, I just keep 3 of them in different locations and physically lost (maybe loaned out) one a few years ago. https://www.stanleytools.com/product/10-179/hi-visibility-re...
It’s not made to fit in the hand. There’s no way to lock the blade forward. It’s one of the stupidest designs you could have for a box cutter.
For what it’s worth, a non-locking blade is a plus for some people. I wouldn’t really want to leave a locking box cutter around, I’m too forgetful, but one that stows itself away automatically I’d feel a bit safer about. Still a silly price, though.
Teenage Engineering seems to run partly on hype and halo effect. It makes cool things you can’t afford, and you buy something cheaper. Selling a vinyl cutting machine keeps them in the news, which keeps them in your mind, and then you think about how you always wanted an OP-1 but oh maybe you could buy the EP-133 instead.
I’m sure there’s a price at which the vinyl cutter is profitable.
It's also possible that TE are full of people who are passionate about design and sound and want to work on and release interesting products in that space. Not everything is a psyop
That took my comment to a much darker place than I anticipated—I think basic marketing is ok, and even if you’re passionate about design, you still should be thinking about the business’s bottom line.
But, like, https://teenage.engineering/store/field-desk
Or maybe the TP-7 is a better example.
They are obviously following the playbook from brands like Supreme. At least in part.
That's basically a bad Eiermann desk ripoff, but about twice as expensive as the original.
https://www.richard-lampert.de/en/furniture/eiermann-1/
The Eiermann looks more sturdy at a glance too, since the legs aren't at the corners.
That is hilarious. Ikea with the Rexroth price tag.
...if only they were at least somewhat as passionate about QC.
It really pains me to be that cynical, because I do find their products incredibly fascinating and inventive. But for anything but their lowest-end toy products the design aspirations - and boutique price tag - clash hard with the reality of their quality track record.
They're passionate about style and brand, not design and sound.
I say this as someone with expertise in a domain they nominally targetted.
Very "cool" looking kit, but: missing basic features, unremarkable in those provided; serious issues rendering it fundamentally inappropriate for its nominal application.
There is one company that sells similar lathe cutters in Europe. To aquire it you need to go on a multi day training in a remote Swiss forest. Then it’s around 10.000 EUR in equipment, granted you supply your own record player (sl1200 ~700EUR). But yeah cutting high quality stereo records is an art. No matter the money you throw at it, it will involve a lot of maintenance, skill, experience, spare parts, mastering skills, consumables, and time (these cut in real time). Indeed, who wants to do that? I welcome any effort in this niche though!
Consistency is super hard to achieve if you are not cutting daily in a (climate) controlled environment, even then, you will burn out the cutting head transducers, your cutting heads will dull (super fast). Operational costs are pretty high. Wonder how much they will charge for this lathe. I guess 40-80k USD?
I have a real “I was born yesterday” feeling having realized that “Teenage Engineering” has nothing to do with making audio tech accessible to young newcomers.
Is that entirely fair?
Their Pocket Operators are pretty cheap and accessible.
rich young newcomers are totally welcome!
There’s certainly novelty to this, I’d love one if the price were reasonable. Direct capture, almost like a polaroid for vinyl records, no need to “develop” it.
I imagine artists could sell a super-limited (i.e. 1 copy) live recording of a show the second it ends for a premium, especially if they kept the machine on stage and personally packaged and signed it.
These are Designed. The target audience has tremendous disposable income, and Taste (subjectively, of course.)
No one is buying this for economy’s sake.
>> "who wants to own cutting vinyl?"
Well, Sega gamers for one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c744iD0_fWU
they list them too https://teenage.engineering/retailers
There used to be places where you could make your own one-of-a-kind record: pretty much direct microphone to vinyl¹ which I’m guessing this essentially is. But that said, I kind of feel like most of Teenage Engineering is more stunt than practical.
⸻
1. A booth for making records like this plays a role in the plot of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Elvis Presley’s very first recordings were a similar thing, the two sides recorded in a booth to make a singular record to give his mother as a present in 1953.
Are there bootlegs on vinyl? Maybe now there can be.
Isn't a vinyl cutter the first step when pressing records?
You might need different machines to cut wax/vinyl directly vs cutting lacquer to make a stamper.
Might I introduce you to the concept of dub plates? I absolutely love playing vinyl as a dj, and being able to cut my own would be worth it to me. Some people are just silly about their hobbies even without going into lalaland like an audiophile. Growing up, my dad had an 8-track recorder and a box of blank cassettes. I would record my music to them as the car I drove still had an 8-track player. It's goofy. It's fun. It's not logical per se, but it's also not hurting you. So leave me to my idiosyncrasies and go back to your Spotify feed and obey and consume as you do
Producing a lathe cut is the first (physical) step of many of pressing vinyl.
This isn’t targeting consumers, or even record stores, but record pressing plants.
This is kind of a big deal because this sort of fundamental equipment hasn’t been available new for decades. The vast majority of plants/mastering facilities are using old Scully lathes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Those are getting ever older and harder to source parts for, and with the vinyl boom the number of pressing plants is actually going up.
Back when I DJ'd techno in the 90s I would have killed for this for what it could bring creatively to a set. Just the ability to cut my own tracks onto white labels and put custom loops etc on vinyl would have really changed things entirely without having to front a whole bunch of cash (which I def did not have) to get a batch of records pressed which probably nobody else would order or play.
But now mixing is done digitally and playing with vinyl is a mostly lost art and it's trivial to put your own material together into audio files and mix it.
I've heard tales of Ritchie Hawtin playing multiple turntables (6-8 depending on who's telling) where he'd have tracks separated as stems into dub plates and do live remixes by swapping out the plates. The things people did before Ableton!
I saw him do 3... maybe 4? tables? But mostly 2 or 3 decks plus a 909.
Around here in Toronto area we had a local (Jeff Milligan / "Algorithm") who was famous for absolutely precise beatmatching, and often 4 deck mixing. Very minimal wonky/bleepy techno.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2083209238436343
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAthnDk7ZcA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6EJOzGj4xM
Playing that minimal techno, I'd need at least that many tables just to keep from being bored.
I mean, it's not listening music, it's dancing music, and contextually needs to be placed in a very atmospheric, very dark room. And mixed well.
Vinylrecorder.com
There’s been a market for this for nearly 30 years (and the rest).
Market: music industry veterans that won the race and have boutique record labels for small runs of obscure or promotional or small bands. Have five records printed for the merch table and the next show. Once you have the machine hopefully the marginal cost of a record would make sense for extremely small runs.
Where a band with no money might struggle to afford a $1000 minimum run somewhere else, they might be able to make beer money at a show with records made on one of these. Probably not "economical" in the machine may never pay for itself, but somebody rich buying one as a mechanism to promote musicians on a small scale probably makes sense to them.
Teenage Engineering has the market of people who have a lot of money to spend on a hobby, want a fancy product design and don't care about cost.
The exception is their PO series stuff which is actually kind of affordable for what you can get out of them.
Nor any clue on what blanks cost. But I could see the thrill of this if money was no object.
I would buy a machine that makes new floppy disk media if it existed, and not because of any economical argument.
I would buy a machine that makes new laserdiscs if it existed, and not because of any economical argument.
... aluminized paper for electric arc printers
... wax film thermal print head ribbon
... a re-inker for cloth typewriter ribbon (at least this one is straightforward to design and build myself some day)
... extra wide cloth matrix printer ribbon with 4 colors
... 1.9mm magnetic tape for exatron wafers
A record cutter has way more potential audience than any of those. They will sell every one they can even manage to make.
Maybe a party novelty for hipsters.
This stuff is like expensive watches. If there was no one to show it off to there would be no one who would buy it.
Sir, I commend you for your lack of taste for aesthetics, "coolness", and for maintaining the cynical, pessimistic Hackernews status quo.
I've been worried this place has gotten eternal september'd full of redditors, AI bots, and low-IQ emotional mainstream political rants.
But then you swoop in here and remind me that it's still 2007 in Hackernews land: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Never change.
To me, "cool" is a slightly derogatory term when applied to design. It usually means that smoke and mirrors play a significant role.
I wonder if it can make a flexidisc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc
I remember to listening to some in my childhood and never understood why the tech was not the standard (relative to the brittle cumbersome vinyls). Maybe the sound quality is worse. Unsure
Because brittle really is a second name for Flexi disc. They have shallower groove which means limited dynamic range, higher hiss/surface noise/distortion, plus because they are so light they often don't sit flat on a turntable so welcome speed variations aka "wow and flutter" and frequent skipping. You could listen 500-1000 times to normal vinyl before any audible degradation and the same may happen to Flexi disc after 5 or 10 times.
Flexi discs were cool inserts for some home computer magazines; you'd dub the flexi disc to music cassette, and the noise and beeps were computer programs for your home computer.
Could you not play the record directly into the computer? I guess you just didn't have the necessary adapter cable?
I remember our home stereo in the 1970s had a rubber non-slip-matt with concentric grooves in it, often flexi-discs were so flexi that that the needle would follow the groove on the other side instead of the one on the disc. They were almost unplayable on that unless you set the tonearm counter-weights to as light as possible.
That built-in obsolescence was often the point of flexi-discs as they were typically used as giveaways in magazines with the goal of promoting the artist - the faster it wears out, the sooner the consumer is likely to go purchase the real thing.
Worse sound quality and even worse longevity.
> direct drive precision polished tungsten shaft
Isn't marketing wonderful. Who cares what the motor shaft is made of? (and why not ordinary steel? tungsten just sounds cooler? they want to reuse it for a lightbulb filament later?)
Tungsten will certainly isolate better than other softer metals. The entire product is centred around embedding vibrations into a physical object. The material that is used to transfer or isolate those vibrations is important especially at signal levels used in lathe cutting.
I suppose its better than it being made of rust like so many other projects like to advertise.
Cool, but can it make parallel grooves like HENGE’s Journey to Voltus B?
https://www.outofrage.net/post/review-henge-journey-to-voltu...
Very cool.
I love this company and wish there was more like them.
Aren't vinyls typically pressed, not carved from a blank? I wonder how accurate they can actually get if they have to carve every notch into the groove.
Master is carved (cutted), and then reverse master pressed, from which all the records are then pressed, if i remember correctly.
The original master is cut. Only subsequent copies are pressed. This is the standard way records are made
You need to carve the master to have something to press from.
Very strange.
It appears they’ll just rebrand a few record cutters and call it a product. TE always comes off as really low quality for the types of prices they charge.
The MPC Sample is 400$ and looks well built, the KO2 is 300$ and has faders falling off.
Roland has a few samplers in the same price range as well.
Price? If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Fancy machine for just making dubplates.
Has anyone tried to 3d print vinyl?
Audio file to gcode is not difficult. Here's a record laser cut into a tortilla [0].
I once tried to mill one out of MDF on a CNC machine [1]. It didn't sound very good, but better than I expected.
3D printing one seems very difficult, since 3D printers build walls instead of cut grooves. Maybe you could play it if you had some kind of bifurcated needle? Anyways, it's enough of a joke that it probably wouldn't work well that it was a Prusa April fools joke [2].
A better printer, maybe a resin one, can do it [3].
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdzCv_9eaoM
1 - https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/wooden-you-like-to-hear-a-cn...
2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV1egpbrg90
3 - https://hackaday.com/2012/12/21/3d-printing-records/
Most 3D prints are vinyls already! the surface encodes some patterns of the motor movements and medium curing process. Shame it wouldn’t sound very good and there’s no machine to play them.
Not 3D printed, but laser cut:
https://github.com/kallaballa/sndcut.git
Works pretty well, certainly not high quality audio, though. Maybe if someone out there has a more precise laser, it'd work ..
Vestax actually did something similar in the early 2000s with the VRX-2000 lathe cutter. It cost around $10K back then.
The audio wasn't the best, but hey, you could make your own dubplates, and it did so in stereo!
APC is an interesting choice of name. A Professional record Cutter.
I wonder if they chose it because of the APC40, which is a delightful set of MIDI pads.
I looked and went, "WTF is that? Looks like a record cutting machine"
Scrolled down
WTAF
I'm a total TE fanboi, I have the OP1F and OP-XY, they're everything I ever wanted and my MPC and Digitakt haven't be touched in months. And the Digitone Keys is unplugged propped against the bookshelf. It's extraordinary how addictive these two little synths are for making things happen.
The APC-2, however, is a fascinating outcome of what happens when you have a bunch of creative people who like - and can - do things that are new to them and make them new to others. It's no wonder they keep getting asked to do cool stuff like Panic's Playdate, Baidu's Raven, Nothing Smartphones and Headphones.
TE have retained this incredible playful vibe that has long drained from Sony and Apple.
I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.
"God, I'm good," thought the Rolex wearer as he glanced at his wrist.
Hipsters will buy anything that looks cool. But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.
> I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.
Nobody pretends that high-end watches are anything besides objets d'art and even then not every watch is a Rolex synonymous with conspicuous consumption. TE, on the other hand, has legions of fans that buy this stuff without knowing the first thing about music production just because they think it's cool and want to try it out. Nobody who buys a $700 Tissot thinks it tells better time than a $17 Casio.
I have no problem with any of this. The world needs more aspiring creatives and it's none of my business how these consumers choose to spend their money. The fact that you find it appropriate to unilaterally shit on people who have nice watches while being in possession of a $2000 groovebox is, however, as the kids say, "a choice."
$700? $70,000 for a Patek Philippe Aquanaut!
I'd guess there's a very high chance someone wearing an Aquanaut is having a better time than someone wearing a $700 Tissot or a $17 Casio, less of a difference between the latter two.
It's not telling better time, it's telling of a better time.
That's very much not how it works. Musk and Trump are absolutely miserable despite having effectively infinite wealth and power. Not that either of them have the taste to wear an Aquanaut, mind.
It seems to me that Teenage Engineering's greatest achievement is the wholesale adoption of Jobs's reality distortion field.
If you re-read your own comment, do you experience cringe? If the answer is no, that's worrying and worth looking into.
Do you like anything? Or have any enthusiasm for life? Is your whole bit just calling other people’s enthusiasm cringe?
Do you accept everything? Are you enthusiastic for scammers that prey on rich sycophants?
The parent comment is right. Their logic is cyclical, they acknowledge that Teenage Engineering is widely accepted to be overpriced hipster crap, and then refuse to defend their conclusion that it's not made for the hipster audience. They do not posit what their "amazing inventions" are, or qualify their justification for buying two (!!!) OP-1 models, or link to the music that could only be made with the OP-1. They are responding to marketing, which is not a healthy habit of consumption in any market. For musicians, it's called Gear Acquisition Syndrome (chronic GAS).
In essence, you are criticizing someone for challenging a rich snake-oil customer.
> I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience
They essentially make toys for that demographic but theres nothing wrong with that if you get enjoyment out of it.
S1E1 of Succession, on the topic of a Patek Phillipe...
"And it's amazingly precise! One look at your wrist and you know exactly how rich you are!"
> The APC-2, however, is a fascinating outcome
> TE's amazing inventions
> But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.
How anyone tells themselves this while buying Teenage Engineering gear is beyond me. The closest TE came to an "amazing invention" was the OP-Z, and that flopped like a fish on land. The whole business is a marketing-saturated DAWless hipster fantasy, hook line and sinker.
I was there when my properly talented musician friends bought the original OP-1, and I was also there when they sold it to afford a better MIDI controller. It's a Fischer-Price 4-track recorder, there's a very good reason you don't see your favorite musicians dailying it.
The OP-Z was an absolute mess! That thinkpad bullshit they used to mold it from had curing issues that they never quite sorted out. Had one from the first run, wouldn't stay on or charge without a vice grip. They sent another one that also was not square/did not sit flat and suffers from intermittent shorts, attempting to use the pressure sensitive top button is a coinflip on it turning off. It's also quite colorblind-hostile, and is impossible to use outside or under bright stage lights. Needing an app to manage it was such a dumb choice. It definitely had some neat pre-MIDI 2.0 ideas but in practice most of what it offers is better handled further up the chain.
The OP-1 (and TX-6) on the other hand are excellent, I have 3 of them and love them dearly! Plenty of producers and bands still use them to great effect, the used price is evidence of this. Treating it as a controller is a pretty solid sign you've missed the point. Most midi devices are not able to cope with the bpm/playback speed shifting in response to the tape interactions (which is fully in spec). I did appreciate people offloading them for cheap.
Inb4 all the commenters going “umm, why would I want this? I could simply burn a CD or make a Spotify playlist if I wanted to share music”
Why wouldn't you use an ADC and store music digitally?