
Vinyl record grooves under an electron microscope - soundsop
http://www.synthgear.com/2010/audio-gear/record-grooves-electron-microscope/
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transmit101
Many years ago I ran a record label, and as part of the process of
manufacturing I took the source DAT tapes to a cutting studio, where an
engineer cut the "lacquer", which is a one-off, soft wax version of what will
later be pressed into hundreds of records.

After he had finished mixing the record and used a lathe to cut the lacquer,
he showed me the grooves which has been cut using a microscope attached to the
lathe. Not quite as much detail as the photos above, but more than enough to
see clearly how the shape of the grooves creates the resultant waveform.

Really, really incredible feeling.

Vinyl records are, without a doubt, one of my favourite pieces of music
technology.

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dirtbox
I hue shifted the 3D one for blue/brown lenses incase anyone's interested.

<http://i47.tinypic.com/2hr25go.jpg>

Also, original link
[http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/cml/opt307/spr05/...](http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/cml/opt307/spr05/chris/)

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jjs
Free upvote to the first person who writes a program to play the waveforms
directly from the scanned images... ;)

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thwarted
A modification to the process described at
<http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/> could do it, but you'd
get like a fraction of a second of decoded audio from the images on that page,
so not that interesting.

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zeynel1
Is the sound created by the change in the depth or the shape of the groove?

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thwarted
Both!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record#Stereo_sound>

While the stylus moves horizontally when reproducing a monophonic disk
recording, on stereo records the stylus moves vertically as well as
horizontally. In fact, prior to the full development of the 45/45 system, the
first stereo cutting heads were made by bolting together one lateral cut head
and one vertical cut head sharing a common stylus holder. Feeding the driving
coils with suitably phased material achieved the 45/45 groove.

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dirtbox
I always wondered how stereo was achieved. God bless Wikipedia!

