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PO-80 Record Factory

teenage.engineering

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Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#51

Post by Applejinx »

wyldfire wrote: post #50
adius wrote: post #48

Listening to a vinyl emits much more CO2 than listening to a digital recording. I wish people would keep that in mind.

Can you put that in some perspective with just an order of magnitude? Somehow it feels like next to auto or plane travel, or consuming beef - audio playback of any kind would seem like it isn't very significant. Hmm actually I wonder now if this was a joke and I just got suckered.

No, Benn Jordan got into that a while back. It's not the listening part, it's the manufacturing that isn't 'green', though I'm not sure quite how the math works: for instance, whether they're counting the trucking of boxes of vinyl circles all over the place rather than just uploading bits locally. Some of that would apply to CDs, too, but CDs are about as relevant as vinyl records are.

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#52

Post by wyldfire »

Applejinx wrote: post #51
wyldfire wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you put that in some perspective with just an order of magnitude? Somehow it feels like next to auto or plane travel, or consuming beef - audio playback of any kind would seem like it isn't very significant. Hmm actually I wonder now if this was a joke and I just got suckered.

No, Benn Jordan got into that a while back. It's not the listening part, it's the manufacturing that isn't 'green', though I'm not sure quite how the math works: for instance, whether they're counting the trucking of boxes of vinyl circles all over the place rather than just uploading bits locally. Some of that would apply to CDs, too, but CDs are about as relevant as vinyl records are.

> it's the manufacturing that isn't 'green'

If this is really the case then it probably doesn't belong in this thread about a usb-powered (!!) "factory".

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#53

Post by tyrnnsrs »

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #35

Price wise this seems alright to me, I imagine it's a bit cheaper than their usual things because it'll become a thing a decent number of people use to make things like rewards for Patreon supporters, zine bonuses, etc. Production costs of £2 plus postage per (potentially) personalised 5" seems pretty good to me for all involved. A tangent but it's crazy how bad their LED matrix for IKEA is, I like the speakers and a…

I applied a colour film over my matrix light because it was so bright

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#54

Post by SeanLuke »

Applejinx wrote: post #51
wyldfire wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you put that in some perspective with just an order of magnitude? Somehow it feels like next to auto or plane travel, or consuming beef - audio playback of any kind would seem like it isn't very significant. Hmm actually I wonder now if this was a joke and I just got suckered.

No, Benn Jordan got into that a while back. It's not the listening part, it's the manufacturing that isn't 'green', though I'm not sure quite how the math works: for instance, whether they're counting the trucking of boxes of vinyl circles all over the place rather than just uploading bits locally. Some of that would apply to CDs, too, but CDs are about as relevant as vinyl records are.

Also worth mentioning that vinyl records cannot be recycled.

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#56

Post by autoexec »

JosephRedfern wrote: post #28
faefox wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

For comparison:

War and Peace is only 3.2 MB, or 3.9 MB with the overhead of HTML

source: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#57

Post by spaceman_2020 »

JosephRedfern wrote: post #28
faefox wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

How does a professional web designer even put up a picture that large without going through some basic compression?

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#58

Post by nerdponx »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #57
JosephRedfern wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How does a professional web designer even put up a picture that large without going through some basic compression?

I've personally experienced this at work before.

A non-technical person uploaded the image to the CMS, assuming it will be scaled down at some point after uploading. A web developer used the image from the CMS, assuming it was scaled down at some point before being exposed for the frontend to access it. In reality the image never got scaled down anywhere, and ended up on the frontend in its full 9 MB glory. This ended up happening with several images.

I (not a frontend dev) ended up finding it because I was writing a strongly-worded message to my team lead about the huge pile of unnecessary tracking/surveillance scripts being forced on frontend users, and I wanted to make the point that it was making the frontend slow and heavy. It turned out out that the tracking scripts were nothing compared to the huge images!

Apparently nobody else bothered to check this before me, and/or didn't stop for half a second to think about it when they saw "Total page size: 13 MB" in their browser devtools, and/or didn't actually attempt to do any investigation when they saw our shitty Lighthouse rating. The world is full of professionals in name and status, but not in attitude.

Re: PO-80 Record Factory

#60

Post by SoftTalker »

TylerE wrote: post #46
MDGeist wrote: post #2

Audio quality is about what you'd expect from a lathe cut record. That being said, since it is so hard to get vinyl pressed these days I could see a small run of cut singles being something artists could sell as a novelty for die hard fans. Neat!

The big problem here is that due to how soft the material has to be to cut, the lifespan on these is going to be somewhere in the realm of 1-10 plays.

That's like an acetate "dubplate" that promoters used give to club DJs to get new music out (mostly replaced by digital files now of course). They were good for a small number of plays and used just to gauge the crowd reaction.
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