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APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

teenage.engineering

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Re: APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

#131

Post by taylodl »

dale_glass wrote: post #108

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 abou…

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.

Re: APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

#132

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dylan604 wrote: post #46
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

#133

Post by voidpointer »

dale_glass wrote: post #108

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 abou…

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.

Re: APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

#135

Post by dahauns »

darnfish wrote: post #13
klodolph wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

...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.

Re: APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

#136

Post by brookst »

taylodl wrote: post #131
dale_glass wrote: post #108

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 abou…

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 precis…

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.

Re: APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

#137

Post by ssl-3 »

dale_glass wrote: post #108

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 abou…

> 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.

Re: APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

#138

Post by dale_glass »

Jgrubb wrote: post #127
dale_glass wrote: post #108

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 abou…

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 tha…

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.

Re: APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

#139

Post by drcongo »

trq01758 wrote: post #111
geokon wrote: post #97

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 af…

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.

Re: APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

#140

Post by finghin »

taylodl wrote: post #131
dale_glass wrote: post #108

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 abou…

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 precis…

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
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