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PO-80 Record Factory

teenage.engineering

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#21
post #8

This appears to be a rebranding (at nearly three times the price) of the Gakken Record Maker (which is still available online for its MSRP of ¥7,980 ($55) [1]). It even comes with a copy of the Gakken magazine! Here's a review of the Gakken record maker (which looks identical to the Teenage Engineering one) [2], the Japanese description from Gakken [3], and an English description from a reseller [4]. Gakken is a Japa…

> Yuri Suzuki has joined forces with cult electronics studio Teenage Engineering and Japanese educational toymaker Gakken to launch the PO-80 Record Factory. https://www.pentagram.com/news/po-80-record-factory

Also, from the submission URL, second paragraph:

> PO-80 record factory is a compact and portable record cutter, made in collaboration with yuri suzuki.

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#22

This is peak of audio hipsterism! Audio quality is crap. Better to record on cassette with some boombox. Also see this DIY project - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7osjazhLE

As someone who has released music on cassettes recently, the unfortunate part is that few people seem to have cassette decks anymore but many people have low end turntables. I suspect even bad sounding records would sell better than cassettes or CDs.

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#23

The most surprising thing about this is how low the price is for a teenage engineering product. I don't know anything about LP manufacturing but 150 for an LP reader / writer seems pretty cool.

It's 3x the price of the Japanese original that was linked in another thread. https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/NEOBK-2453544

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#24

The most surprising thing about this is how low the price is for a teenage engineering product. I don't know anything about LP manufacturing but 150 for an LP reader / writer seems pretty cool.

As someone else has already reported, this is just a TE rebrand of an existing product with a 3x price increase for what I'd call the TE tax.

This doesn't make hifi audio.

It is surprising in the sense that I'm surprised TE didn't charge more but not in the sense that it should charge more.

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#25

This is peak of audio hipsterism! Audio quality is crap. Better to record on cassette with some boombox. Also see this DIY project - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7osjazhLE

In the age of AI fakes and perfect high fidelity available to anybody, the “crap” noise and distortion of this kind of thing is going to become a signal of reality that will be sought after.

Ya they just invented distortion no one does that in music right? It's not like they make pedals and plugins specifically for distortion. Instead you should pay TE for this revolutionary rebranding of an existing device.

It's nonsense sir.

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#26

The most surprising thing about this is how low the price is for a teenage engineering product. I don't know anything about LP manufacturing but 150 for an LP reader / writer seems pretty cool.

The read/write thing got me on the train of thought of DVD-RW.

It uses 5 in discs so an LPRW would fit in a standard bay.

If it records at 33 and plays at 78 it's even a LPRW X 2.23!

I wonder how much data you could store...

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, seems like it would be rather straightforward to send a template design to an online fabrication company. CNC seems like it would be overkill but I assume they are willing to cut sheet metal. That could be a fun assignment for a design course. Lots of technical details to consider, such as dimensions of standard components, but a lot of design freedom as well.

A CNC laser would be the best bet. A good one could cut this in about 5 min. Water jets and CNC plasma cutters could do it, but they would probably both have issues with that many pierces. I agree though - $195 for this is a bit much: https://images.prismic.io/teenageengineering/d379b4fd-3721-4... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGpKAIsUIpI

It looks like it has countersunk screw holes, so that would usually be done on a CNC punch: http://www.vandf.co.uk/tooling/what-is-cnc-punching/ (amazing machines) It also looks powder-coated... when you consider their likely volumes $195 is not unreasonable once you take into account development costs, setup costs and overheads.

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#28
post #7

This appears to be a rebranding (at nearly three times the price) of the Gakken Record Maker (which is still available online for its MSRP of ¥7,980 ($55) [1]). It even comes with a copy of the Gakken magazine! Here's a review of the Gakken record maker (which looks identical to the Teenage Engineering one) [2], the Japanese description from Gakken [3], and an English description from a reseller [4]. Gakken is a Japa…

The margins on everything Teenage Engineering sells must be insane. Thinking in particular of their "computer-1" itx case which is a handful of pieces of unbent sheet metal and commodity parts, all for a mere *$195*.

The photo of the record factory on that landing page weighs in at 9.84MB -- the margin probably goes towards AWS bandwidth costs!

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#29
post #22

This is peak of audio hipsterism! Audio quality is crap. Better to record on cassette with some boombox. Also see this DIY project - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7osjazhLE

As someone who has released music on cassettes recently, the unfortunate part is that few people seem to have cassette decks anymore but many people have low end turntables. I suspect even bad sounding records would sell better than cassettes or CDs.

All new cassette players are very low quality, and the old ones are slowly falling apart. Even though they're often not beyond repair, not a lot of people have the willingness to put in the effort.

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#30
post #26

The most surprising thing about this is how low the price is for a teenage engineering product. I don't know anything about LP manufacturing but 150 for an LP reader / writer seems pretty cool.

The read/write thing got me on the train of thought of DVD-RW. It uses 5 in discs so an LPRW would fit in a standard bay. If it records at 33 and plays at 78 it's even a LPRW X 2.23! I wonder how much data you could store...

Based on cassette data rates using audio encoding, and a total hand-wavey ballpark of ~10kB/min using modern encoding techniques, I'd totally guesstimate about 100kB of data on there.
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