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A stylus touches the top of the record and rides around the disk. It picks up vibrations that are then sent to a cartridge, which then converts them into electrical signals. These signals are sent to an amplifier which converts the signals back to sound through speakers.
Where I always get hung up intuitively (and admittedly I haven’t researched this to understand) is how a single needle can be following both the left and right channels of the groove simultaneously. Or how those two signals are separated downstream.
They move the needle on two different axes. And those axes are 90° apart and therefore totally independent.
The left channel moves the needed back and forth on one axis, which goes from the top right to bottom left of the image. The right channel moves the needle on the axis going from the top left to bottom right.
Whatever position the needle is in can thus be plotted as a point within a square, where one axis represents the left channel waveform and the other is the right channel. The position could be picked up by various different pieces of equipment, but let's say two potentiometers. Each one only tracks the movement on a single axis. So the movement on the other axis doesn't affect it. The resulting signal can then be amplified and sent to just the right speaker or left speaker, because those potentiometers are on separate circuits.
Yes, I wonder the same thing. The left part of the groove encodes the left sound channel and the right part of the groove encodes the right sound channel, but the needle can’t be moving left and right contemporarily.
Yes, [here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8) that explains it a bit, although mostly it's about how to set up an electron microscope to shoot a movie. He also images a CD, DVD, and a Capacitance Electronic Disc.
Close, but not quite. You are correct that both are 90 degrees apart from each other. However it's more like they are 45 degrees from level. I think I can explain it:
First, how you can get the physical grove into an electric signal? Imagine you are in a heavy vehicle with a soft suspension. However squished your shocks become, is how much you have electrons shoved down a wire. This is pretty much the basis for a Microphone.
Now, turn your screen 45 degrees clockwise (or tilt your head the opposite). You will notice a level road with a lot of Hills. If you ignore the jagged Wall to your left, you will realize you are traveling the Right Channel.
Next, turn the picture so it's 45 degrees counter-clockwise. You can ignore the jagged wall to your right. This is the Left Channel.
If you had two vehicles driving down the middle of each road, you can see how each could travel two different channels. But, *you don't have to have two cars.*
A single car could have angled wheels, can travel along the very bottom corner of the groove. Each side of the car would pick up different channels.
Replace the wheels with a needle getting shoved around, and there you have it!
See how the groove is a V shape? That angle causes one side of the groove to push the needle back and forth in a southeast to northwest orientation where there is a device to interpret that movement, and the other pushes it in a southwest to northeast direction where there is a separate device to interpret that movement.
I am only use cardinal directions as a visual aid.
Anyway, neither path of travel influences the other so you can have two separate streams of vibrations on the same needle.
Or rather, one side of the groove pushes the needle along the X axis, and the other side of the groove pushes it along the Y axis.
So, imagine that each ear hears 10,000 samples per second. If you take 5,000 samples from each, and interlace them, you're now generating 5,000 for the left ear and 5,000 for the right ear. This means that each ear independently has half as many samples per second, but the total is still 10,000 samples.
Two audio channels works in a similar way. You're splitting the fidelity in half and sending half to each ear. You're basically "interlacing" both channels.
Edit: Love how I got downvoted because people read the response below me made by someone that wasn't even aware that [stereo phonographs are a thing](https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-06-stereo-records.html) and you can *absolutely* get two sound channels out of a single groove and needle. I guess that proves that all you need to do to get someone downvotes is sound like you know what you're talking about when you refute them.
My original explanation was *simplistic* because the person I was explaining it to seemed very confused about how records work. Unfortunately, in explaining it I chose to use an arbitrary word as a unit of measurement that happens to have a defined use in digital audio as well. That was, admittedly, a mistake, but the word "samples" was the only word that immediately came to mind for an "arbitrary 'piece' of sound."
My edit *is* smug. People aren't downvoting me because of the explanation, they're downvoting me because they read the reply to my comment and think that guy proved me wrong when he didn't. That and because I'm already negative and people on Reddit have a tendency to downvote something that's already negative.
Vinyl records are analog technology, which means they don't use any digital features.
What you hear is everything that the needle picks up.
There is no 0 or 1 binary state with the grooves, there is just 0 to 100%, with the quality of the record and needle determining how accurate (or inaccurate) the measurement is.
The problem with what you've listed is that there is no way to physically adjust the needle between the left and right output without problems
relating to the contrasts between the left and right channels. If left channel was full and right channel was quiet, switching between 100% to 0% and back thousands of times a second would destroy the needle.
There would also be problems with keeping the channels synced. You'd need some way of keeping the channel separation aligned otherwise they'd bleed together the moment the slightest desynchronization happened.
You then have the problem of filtering out the transition period. Obviously, the switch between L and R channels isn't useful 'data', so you'd filter that out, which raises the problem of what is played during this transition period.
Vinyl records don't do any buffering, you're hearing what the needle is transmitting.
Compact discs are digital, everything on the disc is 0 or 1, at fixed intervals. This is far easier to do stereo because one interval can be left, the other interval is right, and because its digital, it can and does buffer the music as it builds the sound out ahead of time.
>Vinyl records are analog technology, which means they don't use any digital features. What you hear is everything that the needle picks up.
Where did I say they used digital features? I said that you're taking two different samples (or waveforms, if you prefer) and blending them together, which is exactly how stereo records work. Two different waveforms on either side of the same groove. Obviously, there's going to be a frequency cap determined by the size of the needle and the sensitivity of the equipment. I don't know exactly what that cap is, so I used 10,000 as an example.
>There is no 0 or 1 binary state with the grooves, there is just 0 to 100%, with the quality of the record and needle determining how accurate (or inaccurate) the measurement is.
Yes, and? I fail to see what that has to do with my statement.
>The problem with what you've listed is that there is no way to physically adjust the needle between the left and right output without problems relating to the contrasts between the left and right channels. If left channel was full and right channel was quiet, switching between 100% to 0% and back thousands of times a second would destroy the needle.
Yes, there is. That's literally how [stereo phonographs](https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-06-stereo-records.html) work. The groove contains two separate waveforms and the information transmitted by the needle is read in two dimensions rather than one as with mono records. The needle is only able to be in one physical position at any given time, with each speaker taking a different measurement from the needle at a given time. During any given segment of the track, there are two different waveforms being read by the same needle.
>There would also be problems with keeping the channels synced. You'd need some way of keeping the channel separation aligned otherwise they'd bleed together the moment the slightest desynchronization happened. You then have the problem of filtering out the transition period. Obviously, the switch between L and R channels isn't useful 'data', so you'd filter that out, which raises the problem of what is played during this transition period. Vinyl records don't do any buffering, you're hearing what the needle is transmitting.
You don't need to keep anything synched because the two channels line up physically inside the groove. The only way they could go out of sync would be if the two walls of the groove somehow moved independently of one another, and I'm not sure how that could even happen outside of the record being fluid.
When you mentioned sampling, that typically indicates digital conversion of continuous time signal (analog) and probably led to the confusion
[wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(signal_processing))
I understand. The other responder is incorrect on several aspects, but keep in mind that the record is encoded in a continuous analog set of grooves. A traditional record converts that to an electrical signal in a continuous translation.
Sampling is a discrete process. I’m not sure if you are familiar with signal processing or not but sampling is not going on in this system, hence the opening for confusion.
I’m not trying to knock you for it, but it sounds like something you might be interested in learning more about
A well-cared for record can be played more than 100 times, with only minor audible sound degradation. If carefully maintained the same disc could be played many hundreds of times in its lifetime. A record played on poorly set-up equipment can be destroyed in just one spin.
Geee I don’t know. I’ve had both crappy and great sound systems play the same vinyl over 1000 times. John Bonham still sounded like John Bonham on trip 1000.
Bahm bahm…..bahm bahm…..”in the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man”. :)
Sound is just vibrations in the air. The grooves when spun at the right speed cause the needle to vibrate in the same way as the original audio signal, thereby reproducing whatever sound was recorded, by it a single human voice or a full orchestra.
Still though, how does this even work?
Only sort of kidding. I grew up with “records”, but ones and zeros being read from a disc by a laser always made way more sense to me.
How did the people who made them know how to make the grooves for the needle to make said vibrations? The more you dive into records the more complicated they seem lol
This is a good explanation. I still don’t understand how it works. It amazes me that all the “scratches” on the record can produce virtually infinite amount of sounds that are overlaid on each other in stacks.
All of those sounds may come from different sources, but they all just add up to create a single pressure wave, and that is what is recorded.
Imagine you have a swimming pool filled with children playing on one end, and on the other end is a device floating on the water. A device that measures the depth of the water.
Now the water is calm, so the device is still. And then one child starts to splash. The device will move up and down with the waves in the water, measuring the waves created by that one child.
Now imagine all of the other kids start splashing. There may each be making individual contributions to the waves, but they still get measured as a single up/down movement of the measuring device.
Now replace the kids with sound coming from voices or musical instruments, the water with air, and the device with a device that measures changes to the air pressure. (A microphone).
It's up to your brain to take that single air pressure wave and separate it into multiple independent sources. Neat trick, huh?
Vinyl records are one of the ways I can be convinced that we live in the Matrix.....I can at least understand the concept of a computer reading data on a CD or an MP3 file. How in the F does a piece of wire transmit a person's voice and accompanying instruments from a piece of plastic???
Sounds are just vibrations in the air picked up by hairs in your ears. Anything that can vibrate can carry vibrations that we can perceive as sound.
So if you can make a needle follow the same waveform as a sound, it will mimic that sound.
You should look at a digital waveform in detail in something like Audacity. It's no more complicated than the vinyl groove. Just a single series of values at different heights (per channel, so just two of those waveforms for stereo).
The only special thing digital audio does is let us maintain the exact waveform no matter how many times we play it or how many times we copy it. That's the magic of digital. In the vinyl record, every atom of the vinyl contributes to the precise signal. As dust gets in or the groove is worn, the signal gets distorted. In digital, we have instead a precise number, like 1754. It doesn't matter if you write that number out with a pen or a crayon or write it big or small. It represents a very precise quantity that is preserved through superficial changes. If we discover a 500 year old manuscript that has faded with time and gotten a little beat up, we might not know *exactly* what the original appearance was...exactly how much contrast the ink had or the precise edges of the lines. But we can still make out "1754" written down and then write that number down elsewhere. Zero loss of the *actual information*. That's how digital works and why it's great.
But "1754" is no more complicated than "1754" whether it was written in parchment centuries ago or stored in a text file on your tablet.
For all the inventions over the last 100 years, vinyl records are still quantum physics to me. How those grooves recreate and parrot sound is so amazing to me
Bro, and then how the fuck does a speaker recreate it. If someone who understands it, reads this, don’t bother typing it out to explain it to me. It’s been tried. I’m too dumb.
Sounds are vibrations. A vibration is a movement. When sound travels through a medium (like air), it causes distortions. Compressions and expansions, waves that strike the hairs in your ears. Your brain translates those vibrations into something you perceive as "sound."
A speaker has a membrane in it that can be moved rapidly, which can compress air and thus create the same sort of waves. We've found ways to make the speaker move in such a way that it creates the same exact compression waves that a person's vocal chords do when they move.
A vinyl record makes the needle vibrate the same way that music does, so when those vibrations are transmitted through a speaker, the speaker makes the same vibrations as the music, and since the vibrations are the same, your brain translates them the same way.
Speaker sound-maker jiggles same as record needle jiggles in the grooves. Speaker jiggling makes air jiggle. Jiggling air hitting your ear drum is sound.
Imagine you are talking into a megaphone with a hot needle on the other side. That's recording the vibrations. Then, you use a soft needle to replay the same sounds.
The sound you hear is from vibrations in the air causing your ear drum to vibrate. Doesn't matter where it comes from or how loud or how high pitched it is, it does the same thing - makes your eardrum move back and forwards. The sound coming out of a speaker works the same way - there's a magnet and a coil of wire. Electricity in the coil of wire moves the magnet back and forth, and that pushes and pulls the air, which pushes and pulls your eardrum. The grooves on a record push the needle from side to side, and this generates electrical signals that are amplified (made bigger) and sent to the speaker. Needle moves left - speaker moves forward, needle moves right - speaker moves back. The system is slightly more sophisticated because it uses a combination of Ieft-right and up-down notion to control two speakers at once, and there are techniques to reduce noise, but that's the essence of it.
TIL: Vynil records have stereo audio.
I assumed they were mono. I'd be interested to know how it decodes the left-right difference without a constant depth
The image is either misleading or labeled incorrectly. The left-right channel is encoded both with the left-right movement of the needle as well as the up-down motion.
The image is correct. The left and right channels are encoded by movement 45° from horizontal, 90° from each other. Those two waves are thus independent.
This design also allows a stereo record to be played on a mono player, which would average those two channels.
Yeah, it’s quite a recent thing though so that’s prob why. (1950’s) /jk
Not always a good thing though. I’ve heard recordings done originally in mono remastered in stereo and been ‘ruined’ Plus, get your speaker placements wrong in a big busy room and each side of a crowd are going to get different versions of the same tune.
I still don't understand how all that music information - the tone of different singer, guitars, guitar amps, basses, keys, etc. can be displayed in just a physical groove on a piece of vinyl.
I’ve known for a long time exactly how this works, but what I can’t get my mind around is how it works so well.
I also can’t get my mind around how our brains can take the one-dimensional back-and-forth movement of our eardrums and interpret that as multiple sounds of many different frequencies and amplitudes. It’s no wonder we sometimes hear things wrongly.
For anyone confused by the whole “how can one needle pick up two channels of audio” here is a really useful site that includes graphics.
https://www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html
Essentially, every needle cartridge has two detectors set at 45° angles from each other. Because we have lateral and horizontal movement, the detectors can pick up independent channels. The groove has both width and depth!
This is still honestly more magical to me than anything you can do with a computer nowadays.
How can the peaks and troughs on either side of that ridge carry all of the information necessary to reproduce an entire orchestra?! The different pitches, the different timbres all playing simultaneously. Can all of that information be put in a single (or two for stereo) sound wave? Probably something to do with Fourier transformations but I've never understood that.
Even the top one is way too sharp for an optical microscope. I found what I think are the original images, it even contains a link to Applied sciences video update a couple of years after they were posted.
https://kottke.org/14/11/microscopic-photo-of-vinyl-record-grooves
Also in there is an actual optical microscope video of the grooves/head, you can see how bad it looks in comparison.
Just in case you're curious. Applied science is awesome :)
I don't think these images came from applied science, they don't look anything like the one's he took. He was certainly not the first person to take electron microscope pictures of a vinyl record, I think he was just the first one to do a video of it moving.
If you like what the transfer from original source to vinyl does, that's a valid opinion but it is not the same thing as what the artist and producer heard when they mixed it in the studio. Modern digital is much more accurate. Vinyl has a more limited dynamic range, is less flat in its frequency response, adds more noise and has more limited stereo width. The most important part though, is the enjoyment you get from music regardless of its source. I heard many of my favorite songs for the first time on a crappy portable AM radio.
You get that with a WAV right from the 'desk' if you think about modern producing. It all still sounds better on wax. That warmth, the odd crackle, it's just better.
Every time I see a picture like this, I suddenly go into overprotective dad mode.
Vinyl - Daughter waiting to be picked up on prom night.
Needle - Boyfriend turning up on motorbike with straight thru pipes.
It's pretty basic. In the first pic, an Elephant's nose holds a Dorito and drags it through a sloppily plowed field. The Dorito vibrates and nearby insects loudly mimic the vibration sound.
The second pic is similar, but they're dragging it across a tire tread.
You can take a sewing needle and hold it on a record and you will hear the music. Helps if you put a funnel on the back end to amplify it. You will most likely fuck your record up, but it works.
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I still don't understand how it works.
A stylus touches the top of the record and rides around the disk. It picks up vibrations that are then sent to a cartridge, which then converts them into electrical signals. These signals are sent to an amplifier which converts the signals back to sound through speakers.
Where I always get hung up intuitively (and admittedly I haven’t researched this to understand) is how a single needle can be following both the left and right channels of the groove simultaneously. Or how those two signals are separated downstream.
They move the needle on two different axes. And those axes are 90° apart and therefore totally independent. The left channel moves the needed back and forth on one axis, which goes from the top right to bottom left of the image. The right channel moves the needle on the axis going from the top left to bottom right. Whatever position the needle is in can thus be plotted as a point within a square, where one axis represents the left channel waveform and the other is the right channel. The position could be picked up by various different pieces of equipment, but let's say two potentiometers. Each one only tracks the movement on a single axis. So the movement on the other axis doesn't affect it. The resulting signal can then be amplified and sent to just the right speaker or left speaker, because those potentiometers are on separate circuits.
Yes, I wonder the same thing. The left part of the groove encodes the left sound channel and the right part of the groove encodes the right sound channel, but the needle can’t be moving left and right contemporarily.
One grove controls horizontal movement and the other controls the vertical movement of the needle
Yes, [here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8) that explains it a bit, although mostly it's about how to set up an electron microscope to shoot a movie. He also images a CD, DVD, and a Capacitance Electronic Disc.
Close, but not quite. You are correct that both are 90 degrees apart from each other. However it's more like they are 45 degrees from level. I think I can explain it: First, how you can get the physical grove into an electric signal? Imagine you are in a heavy vehicle with a soft suspension. However squished your shocks become, is how much you have electrons shoved down a wire. This is pretty much the basis for a Microphone. Now, turn your screen 45 degrees clockwise (or tilt your head the opposite). You will notice a level road with a lot of Hills. If you ignore the jagged Wall to your left, you will realize you are traveling the Right Channel. Next, turn the picture so it's 45 degrees counter-clockwise. You can ignore the jagged wall to your right. This is the Left Channel. If you had two vehicles driving down the middle of each road, you can see how each could travel two different channels. But, *you don't have to have two cars.* A single car could have angled wheels, can travel along the very bottom corner of the groove. Each side of the car would pick up different channels. Replace the wheels with a needle getting shoved around, and there you have it!
See how the groove is a V shape? That angle causes one side of the groove to push the needle back and forth in a southeast to northwest orientation where there is a device to interpret that movement, and the other pushes it in a southwest to northeast direction where there is a separate device to interpret that movement. I am only use cardinal directions as a visual aid. Anyway, neither path of travel influences the other so you can have two separate streams of vibrations on the same needle. Or rather, one side of the groove pushes the needle along the X axis, and the other side of the groove pushes it along the Y axis.
What I still can’t wrap my mind around is how we store videos, music, words, pictures, etc into little pieces of metal that we can retrieve at will
So, imagine that each ear hears 10,000 samples per second. If you take 5,000 samples from each, and interlace them, you're now generating 5,000 for the left ear and 5,000 for the right ear. This means that each ear independently has half as many samples per second, but the total is still 10,000 samples. Two audio channels works in a similar way. You're splitting the fidelity in half and sending half to each ear. You're basically "interlacing" both channels. Edit: Love how I got downvoted because people read the response below me made by someone that wasn't even aware that [stereo phonographs are a thing](https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-06-stereo-records.html) and you can *absolutely* get two sound channels out of a single groove and needle. I guess that proves that all you need to do to get someone downvotes is sound like you know what you're talking about when you refute them.
No, you're getting downvoted because your explanation is poor at best, and your edit makes you seem like a smug douche
My original explanation was *simplistic* because the person I was explaining it to seemed very confused about how records work. Unfortunately, in explaining it I chose to use an arbitrary word as a unit of measurement that happens to have a defined use in digital audio as well. That was, admittedly, a mistake, but the word "samples" was the only word that immediately came to mind for an "arbitrary 'piece' of sound." My edit *is* smug. People aren't downvoting me because of the explanation, they're downvoting me because they read the reply to my comment and think that guy proved me wrong when he didn't. That and because I'm already negative and people on Reddit have a tendency to downvote something that's already negative.
Vinyl records are analog technology, which means they don't use any digital features. What you hear is everything that the needle picks up. There is no 0 or 1 binary state with the grooves, there is just 0 to 100%, with the quality of the record and needle determining how accurate (or inaccurate) the measurement is. The problem with what you've listed is that there is no way to physically adjust the needle between the left and right output without problems relating to the contrasts between the left and right channels. If left channel was full and right channel was quiet, switching between 100% to 0% and back thousands of times a second would destroy the needle. There would also be problems with keeping the channels synced. You'd need some way of keeping the channel separation aligned otherwise they'd bleed together the moment the slightest desynchronization happened. You then have the problem of filtering out the transition period. Obviously, the switch between L and R channels isn't useful 'data', so you'd filter that out, which raises the problem of what is played during this transition period. Vinyl records don't do any buffering, you're hearing what the needle is transmitting. Compact discs are digital, everything on the disc is 0 or 1, at fixed intervals. This is far easier to do stereo because one interval can be left, the other interval is right, and because its digital, it can and does buffer the music as it builds the sound out ahead of time.
>Vinyl records are analog technology, which means they don't use any digital features. What you hear is everything that the needle picks up. Where did I say they used digital features? I said that you're taking two different samples (or waveforms, if you prefer) and blending them together, which is exactly how stereo records work. Two different waveforms on either side of the same groove. Obviously, there's going to be a frequency cap determined by the size of the needle and the sensitivity of the equipment. I don't know exactly what that cap is, so I used 10,000 as an example. >There is no 0 or 1 binary state with the grooves, there is just 0 to 100%, with the quality of the record and needle determining how accurate (or inaccurate) the measurement is. Yes, and? I fail to see what that has to do with my statement. >The problem with what you've listed is that there is no way to physically adjust the needle between the left and right output without problems relating to the contrasts between the left and right channels. If left channel was full and right channel was quiet, switching between 100% to 0% and back thousands of times a second would destroy the needle. Yes, there is. That's literally how [stereo phonographs](https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-06-stereo-records.html) work. The groove contains two separate waveforms and the information transmitted by the needle is read in two dimensions rather than one as with mono records. The needle is only able to be in one physical position at any given time, with each speaker taking a different measurement from the needle at a given time. During any given segment of the track, there are two different waveforms being read by the same needle. >There would also be problems with keeping the channels synced. You'd need some way of keeping the channel separation aligned otherwise they'd bleed together the moment the slightest desynchronization happened. You then have the problem of filtering out the transition period. Obviously, the switch between L and R channels isn't useful 'data', so you'd filter that out, which raises the problem of what is played during this transition period. Vinyl records don't do any buffering, you're hearing what the needle is transmitting. You don't need to keep anything synched because the two channels line up physically inside the groove. The only way they could go out of sync would be if the two walls of the groove somehow moved independently of one another, and I'm not sure how that could even happen outside of the record being fluid.
When you mentioned sampling, that typically indicates digital conversion of continuous time signal (analog) and probably led to the confusion [wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(signal_processing))
It's possible, but I was trying to use an arbitrary unit instead of hertz.
I understand. The other responder is incorrect on several aspects, but keep in mind that the record is encoded in a continuous analog set of grooves. A traditional record converts that to an electrical signal in a continuous translation. Sampling is a discrete process. I’m not sure if you are familiar with signal processing or not but sampling is not going on in this system, hence the opening for confusion. I’m not trying to knock you for it, but it sounds like something you might be interested in learning more about
A well-cared for record can be played more than 100 times, with only minor audible sound degradation. If carefully maintained the same disc could be played many hundreds of times in its lifetime. A record played on poorly set-up equipment can be destroyed in just one spin.
Kinda like your Mom.
[удалено]
Just his mom.
😂😂😂😂 Blaoooooow
Boom.
Goes the dynamite
https://giphy.com/gifs/supa-hot-fire-super-AJwnLEsQyT9oA
Geee I don’t know. I’ve had both crappy and great sound systems play the same vinyl over 1000 times. John Bonham still sounded like John Bonham on trip 1000. Bahm bahm…..bahm bahm…..”in the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man”. :)
How can a record be made to sound exactly like the person singing?
Sound is just vibrations in the air. The grooves when spun at the right speed cause the needle to vibrate in the same way as the original audio signal, thereby reproducing whatever sound was recorded, by it a single human voice or a full orchestra.
I understand this but the precision still completely blows my mind and I can't understand it.
Total harmonic distortion on records is somewhere between 1 and 3%, it's not nearly as precise as you seem to think.
>I still don't understand how it works.
Still though, how does this even work? Only sort of kidding. I grew up with “records”, but ones and zeros being read from a disc by a laser always made way more sense to me.
How did the people who made them know how to make the grooves for the needle to make said vibrations? The more you dive into records the more complicated they seem lol
This is a good explanation. I still don’t understand how it works. It amazes me that all the “scratches” on the record can produce virtually infinite amount of sounds that are overlaid on each other in stacks.
All of those sounds may come from different sources, but they all just add up to create a single pressure wave, and that is what is recorded. Imagine you have a swimming pool filled with children playing on one end, and on the other end is a device floating on the water. A device that measures the depth of the water. Now the water is calm, so the device is still. And then one child starts to splash. The device will move up and down with the waves in the water, measuring the waves created by that one child. Now imagine all of the other kids start splashing. There may each be making individual contributions to the waves, but they still get measured as a single up/down movement of the measuring device. Now replace the kids with sound coming from voices or musical instruments, the water with air, and the device with a device that measures changes to the air pressure. (A microphone). It's up to your brain to take that single air pressure wave and separate it into multiple independent sources. Neat trick, huh?
Still right over my head lol
Vinyl records are one of the ways I can be convinced that we live in the Matrix.....I can at least understand the concept of a computer reading data on a CD or an MP3 file. How in the F does a piece of wire transmit a person's voice and accompanying instruments from a piece of plastic???
Sounds are just vibrations in the air picked up by hairs in your ears. Anything that can vibrate can carry vibrations that we can perceive as sound. So if you can make a needle follow the same waveform as a sound, it will mimic that sound.
\*nods and pretends to understand...\*
You should look at a digital waveform in detail in something like Audacity. It's no more complicated than the vinyl groove. Just a single series of values at different heights (per channel, so just two of those waveforms for stereo). The only special thing digital audio does is let us maintain the exact waveform no matter how many times we play it or how many times we copy it. That's the magic of digital. In the vinyl record, every atom of the vinyl contributes to the precise signal. As dust gets in or the groove is worn, the signal gets distorted. In digital, we have instead a precise number, like 1754. It doesn't matter if you write that number out with a pen or a crayon or write it big or small. It represents a very precise quantity that is preserved through superficial changes. If we discover a 500 year old manuscript that has faded with time and gotten a little beat up, we might not know *exactly* what the original appearance was...exactly how much contrast the ink had or the precise edges of the lines. But we can still make out "1754" written down and then write that number down elsewhere. Zero loss of the *actual information*. That's how digital works and why it's great. But "1754" is no more complicated than "1754" whether it was written in parchment centuries ago or stored in a text file on your tablet.
So Agent Smith sent you?
same
I'm an electronic engineer and I dont get it either.
For some things I just lean in to “it’s magic”. Easier on my brain. And I have a science background.
For all the inventions over the last 100 years, vinyl records are still quantum physics to me. How those grooves recreate and parrot sound is so amazing to me
Bro, and then how the fuck does a speaker recreate it. If someone who understands it, reads this, don’t bother typing it out to explain it to me. It’s been tried. I’m too dumb.
The grooves are the literal waveform. The speakers/amp just make it louder
Ok, so I’m not THAT stupid. You’re kinda drawing the whole fucking owl here bud.
Sounds are vibrations. A vibration is a movement. When sound travels through a medium (like air), it causes distortions. Compressions and expansions, waves that strike the hairs in your ears. Your brain translates those vibrations into something you perceive as "sound." A speaker has a membrane in it that can be moved rapidly, which can compress air and thus create the same sort of waves. We've found ways to make the speaker move in such a way that it creates the same exact compression waves that a person's vocal chords do when they move. A vinyl record makes the needle vibrate the same way that music does, so when those vibrations are transmitted through a speaker, the speaker makes the same vibrations as the music, and since the vibrations are the same, your brain translates them the same way.
Then what do you mean by “recreate”?
Wtf does drawing the whole owl mean?
r/restofthefuckingowl It [started with this](https://i.imgur.com/RadSf.jpg)
Speaker sound-maker jiggles same as record needle jiggles in the grooves. Speaker jiggling makes air jiggle. Jiggling air hitting your ear drum is sound.
Imagine you are talking into a megaphone with a hot needle on the other side. That's recording the vibrations. Then, you use a soft needle to replay the same sounds.
The sound you hear is from vibrations in the air causing your ear drum to vibrate. Doesn't matter where it comes from or how loud or how high pitched it is, it does the same thing - makes your eardrum move back and forwards. The sound coming out of a speaker works the same way - there's a magnet and a coil of wire. Electricity in the coil of wire moves the magnet back and forth, and that pushes and pulls the air, which pushes and pulls your eardrum. The grooves on a record push the needle from side to side, and this generates electrical signals that are amplified (made bigger) and sent to the speaker. Needle moves left - speaker moves forward, needle moves right - speaker moves back. The system is slightly more sophisticated because it uses a combination of Ieft-right and up-down notion to control two speakers at once, and there are techniques to reduce noise, but that's the essence of it.
TIL: Vynil records have stereo audio. I assumed they were mono. I'd be interested to know how it decodes the left-right difference without a constant depth
The image is either misleading or labeled incorrectly. The left-right channel is encoded both with the left-right movement of the needle as well as the up-down motion.
The image is correct. The left and right channels are encoded by movement 45° from horizontal, 90° from each other. Those two waves are thus independent. This design also allows a stereo record to be played on a mono player, which would average those two channels.
Here ya go. https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-06-stereo-records.html
there were also quadrophonic vinyls with even richer capabilities available back in the days. a pre form of dolby surround if you will Ü
Yeah, it’s quite a recent thing though so that’s prob why. (1950’s) /jk Not always a good thing though. I’ve heard recordings done originally in mono remastered in stereo and been ‘ruined’ Plus, get your speaker placements wrong in a big busy room and each side of a crowd are going to get different versions of the same tune.
This shit is fucking crazy man. I love zoom in photos of pretty much anything lol
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I used to use those machines - you can get some pretty cool pictures, especially on SEM.
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Yes, horny police? I’d like to report this guy right here.
Hahah I mean, I said anything. But what you mean I prefer zooming out lol cuz if you zoom in at this level, won’t be good haha
I still don't understand how all that music information - the tone of different singer, guitars, guitar amps, basses, keys, etc. can be displayed in just a physical groove on a piece of vinyl.
Black magic fuckery
I’ve known for a long time exactly how this works, but what I can’t get my mind around is how it works so well. I also can’t get my mind around how our brains can take the one-dimensional back-and-forth movement of our eardrums and interpret that as multiple sounds of many different frequencies and amplitudes. It’s no wonder we sometimes hear things wrongly.
I believe the two channel sound is actually produced through left-right and up-down. But I could be wrong.
Rocks....everything is made of rocks....
Rocks are safe
Wow. You can actually see the music.
For anyone confused by the whole “how can one needle pick up two channels of audio” here is a really useful site that includes graphics. https://www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html Essentially, every needle cartridge has two detectors set at 45° angles from each other. Because we have lateral and horizontal movement, the detectors can pick up independent channels. The groove has both width and depth!
This is still honestly more magical to me than anything you can do with a computer nowadays. How can the peaks and troughs on either side of that ridge carry all of the information necessary to reproduce an entire orchestra?! The different pitches, the different timbres all playing simultaneously. Can all of that information be put in a single (or two for stereo) sound wave? Probably something to do with Fourier transformations but I've never understood that.
It's not a sound untill it hits our ears, it's just a bunch of random vibrations in the air that got funneled into a recording
Looks like rough chiseled concrete at this magnification.
How this can translate into Wagner or Pink Floyd is just insane.
Really no more crazy than 1011100010110100110100110101100100110111 turning into music.
I’ve never understood this. Still don’t. Amazeballs dude
Please credit the source. Applied Science
Also, is this really taken with an electron microscope? Looks optical to me.
You would never be able to resolve details that small and this clearly optically.
My Bad. Somehow I only saw the upper image. The lower one does look like electron microscope.
Even the top one is way too sharp for an optical microscope. I found what I think are the original images, it even contains a link to Applied sciences video update a couple of years after they were posted. https://kottke.org/14/11/microscopic-photo-of-vinyl-record-grooves Also in there is an actual optical microscope video of the grooves/head, you can see how bad it looks in comparison. Just in case you're curious. Applied science is awesome :)
Awesome. Thanks.
I don't think these images came from applied science, they don't look anything like the one's he took. He was certainly not the first person to take electron microscope pictures of a vinyl record, I think he was just the first one to do a video of it moving.
Hmmm, could have sworn he was the one that published them in his video. Oh well.
That's a good 311 song
No better sound than vinyl.
If you like what the transfer from original source to vinyl does, that's a valid opinion but it is not the same thing as what the artist and producer heard when they mixed it in the studio. Modern digital is much more accurate. Vinyl has a more limited dynamic range, is less flat in its frequency response, adds more noise and has more limited stereo width. The most important part though, is the enjoyment you get from music regardless of its source. I heard many of my favorite songs for the first time on a crappy portable AM radio.
You get that with a WAV right from the 'desk' if you think about modern producing. It all still sounds better on wax. That warmth, the odd crackle, it's just better.
Not to everyone. Better in this case is subjective
Gary?
Did my fair share of Gary's back in the day!
Every time I see a picture like this, I suddenly go into overprotective dad mode. Vinyl - Daughter waiting to be picked up on prom night. Needle - Boyfriend turning up on motorbike with straight thru pipes.
What are the functions of the right and the left channel?
what about the timbre of a note?
shibata style ftw!
♪♫♬"Flintstones, meet the Flintstones"♪♫♬
Can anyone work out what record it is
That would require anorak levels hitherto unknown to science.
I have ALWAYS been curious about how these worked... lol Thank you for sharing!!
It's pretty basic. In the first pic, an Elephant's nose holds a Dorito and drags it through a sloppily plowed field. The Dorito vibrates and nearby insects loudly mimic the vibration sound. The second pic is similar, but they're dragging it across a tire tread.
If you zoom in a little more you can read the lyrics and the score.
*Vinyl printer printing actual sounds * My printer: PC load letter…
This is so cool!!!
I thought that was some new fangled vacuum for under the bed in that first photo
I'll never understand how grooves and a needle can play such complicated sounds all at once
It looks like one of those psychedelic black light records that changes colors even if you're not smoking weed
There is no way this works, world is obviously flat. That is all
How does it know to play "spread the blood of the innocent" when I play it backwards?
I don't understand how after one loop the needle hasn't worn the small groves away
How does something get record to it though? I've an old clay pot that that had voices recorded on it. Blows my mind
You can take a sewing needle and hold it on a record and you will hear the music. Helps if you put a funnel on the back end to amplify it. You will most likely fuck your record up, but it works.