If ever the Voyager records are found by extraterrestrials, this is likely how they would analyse and eventually play the record.
Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
91–100 of 107 posts
Re: Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
#92Finally we can listen to analog media with distinctively digital artefacts!
Nice experiment.
Re: Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
#93The "decodings" are awful.
And that's okay. Not every experiment needs to be a successful one or have perfect results. It's not like the author is so self-absorbed that they claim they are good. They explicitly say the decodings are "nearly-intelligible".
Re: Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
#94Yes. But can you make vinyl records with laser printer? If you print on transparent, there are clearly ridges which could be enuff to guide a needle. I do not have record player anymore, so I cannot test this.
Re: Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
#95Carl Haber, a guy I worked with at LBNL[1] about twenty years ago pioneered this technique, at least as far as I know. The really cool thing about it is how it can be used to play very fragile recordings without damaging them. "The method has been used to successfully play several recordings for the first time, including an 1860 phonautogram, the oldest known sound recording of a human voice, and the only known recor…
I saw him present about around 20 years ago at the I School Friday afternoon seminar in South Hall. At the time, there was a weird warble.
Re: Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
#96Stero channels aren't encoded in the depth and radial axes. They're encoded in the same plane, but rotated 45 degrees, so a mono record player (depth only) plays a balanced sum of each channel. Edit: mono is radial only, not depth.
I always found this solution to be an incredibly clever and elegant way to encode stereo sound while maintaining backward compatibility.
Yep. This is one of my favourite engineering solutions of all time, up there with colour TV and UTF-8.
Re: Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found out when digitizing vinyl that LP's before 1977, when digital mixing and mastering was not the norm that there is more data in the frequencies between 20 and 50kHz. I do my recording standard at 192kHz and analogue LP's often reach 48kHz of data while digital mastered ones do only 22kHz. After that date often the frequency is cutoff at 20-22kHz, probably to save memory room. Only after 2000-2010 there is enou…
"Most awful are cds having only 16 bits and 41kHz sample rate, by modern standards really poor." 44.1kHz is all that one needs for -perfect fidelity-, given that humans cannot hear higher than ~20kHz. See: Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. [0] 16 bits of quantization gives a Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of 96dB, and noise dithering increases that [1]. More bits are not necessary unless one is doing music production wi…
There is an extremely nice "Digital show and tell" video by Monty at
https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
(part 1 at https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml is also very well worth watching.)
Re: Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are one of several things. Most likely, CDs just don't get mastered right. The music is compressed and so even though the format is better, the music is worse. Vinyl is sold to people who care about sound, in their living rooms so they get better mastering. Digital is for people out and about, in your car you need compression even though it destroyes the music you can't even hear 3/4ths of the sound without it.…
"Vinyl is able to get a slightly better S/N ratio in perfect conditions." No. Compact Discs have an SNR of 96dB. Vinyl typically has an SNR of 60-70dB. The physics of these mediums aside, CDs are a newer technology... Why would we have gone for inferior distribution mediums? "Most likely, CDs just don't get mastered right. The music is compressed and so even though the format is better, the music is worse" Compressio…
> Compact Discs have an SNR of 96dB. Vinyl typically has an SNR of 60-70dB.
you are confusing typical with what it is capable of in lab like conditions. I agree in real use CDs have a better SNR.
> Thankfully, the loudness wars are mostly over, but generally speaking the actual distributed master would've been the same.
The loudness wars being over helps a lot. However vinyl often is mastered different. Just because you didn't do that doesn't mean others are not. For the few who bother with vinyl of course.
> they are in no way, shape, or form better than the bit-for-bit perfect distribution of CDs
I didn't mean to imply that. I only stated that in ideal conditions they can be better, and that often they get a better music going in. The first of course assumes always fails when put into the real world. The second is very much YMMV, but happens just often enough to be aware of.
Re: Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
#99Re: Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner (2013)
#100I'm curious about the date tag (2013)?
Wayback Machine does indeed has archives of the page from 2013 onwards, but while googling "Vinyl-ROM" (inspired by comments in this thread) I found a reference to this exact huji.ac.il page in a comment thread on Halfbakery dating back to 2003:
https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Vinyl-ROM
In fact the parent URL does have WayBack archives going back to the early 2000s, which include this content. dang: I nominate the date for this item should be listed as 2003.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030221050553/http://www.cs.huji...