vinyl

37 Articles

A Record Lathe For Analog Audio Perfection

October 14, 2025 by 11 Comments

It’s no secret that here at Hackaday we’ve at times been tempted to poke fun at the world of audiophiles, a place where engineering sometimes takes second place to outright silliness. But when a high quality audio project comes along that brings some serious engineering to the table we’re all there for it, so when we saw [Slyka] had published the files for their open source record lathe, we knew it had to be time to bring it to you.

Truth be told we’ve been following this project for quite a while as they present tantalizing glimpses of it on social media, so while as they observe, documentation is hard, it should still be enough for anyone willing to try cutting their own recordings to get started. There’s the lathe itself, the controller, the software, and a tool for mapping EQ curves. It cuts in polycarbonate, though sadly there doesn’t seem to be a sound sample online for us to judge.

If you’re hungry for more this certainly isn’t the first record lathe we’ve brought you, and meanwhile we’ve gone a little deeper into the mystique surrounding vinyl.

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Hackaday Links: July 13, 2025

July 13, 2025 by 8 Comments

There’s interesting news out of Wyoming, where a coal mine was opened this week. But the fact that it’s the first new coal mine in 50 years isn’t the big news — it’s the mine’s abundance of rare earth elements that’s grabbing the headlines. As we’ve pointed out before, rare earth elements aren’t actually all that rare, they’re just widely distributed through the Earth’s crust, making them difficult to recover. But there are places where the concentration of rare earth metals like neodymium, dysprosium, scandium, and terbium is slightly higher than normal, making recovery a little less of a challenge. The Brook Mine outside of Sheridan, Wyoming is one such place, at least according to a Preliminary Economic Assessment performed by Ramaco Resources, the mining company that’s developing the deposit.

The PEA states that up to 1,200 tons of rare earth oxides will be produced a year, mainly from the “carbonaceous claystones and shales located above and below the coal seams.” That sounds like good news to us for a couple of reasons. First, clays and shales are relatively soft rocks, making it less energy- and time-intensive to recover massive amounts of raw material than it would be for harder rock types. But the fact that the rare earth elements aren’t locked inside the coal is what’s really exciting. If the REEs were in the coal itself, that would present something similar to the “gasoline problem” we’ve discussed before. Crude oil is a mixture of different hydrocarbons, so if you need one fraction, like diesel, but not another, like gasoline, perhaps because you’ve switched to electric vehicles, tough luck — the refining process still produces as much gasoline as the crude contains. In this case, it seems like the coal trapped between the REE-bearing layers is the primary economic driver for the mine, but if in the future the coal isn’t needed, the REEs could perhaps be harvested and the coal simply left behind to be buried in the ground whence it came.

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Hackaday Links: October 27, 2024

October 27, 2024 by 14 Comments

Problem solved? If the problem is supplying enough lithium to build batteries for all the electric vehicles that will be needed by 2030, then a new lithium deposit in Arkansas might be a resounding “Yes!” The discovery involves the Smackover Formation — and we’ll be honest here that half the reason we chose to feature this story was to be able to write “Smackover Formation” — which is a limestone aquifer covering a vast arc from the Rio Grande River in Texas through to the western tip of the Florida panhandle. Parts of the aquifer, including the bit that bulges up into southern Arkansas, bear a brine rich in lithium salts, far more so than any of the brines currently commercially exploited for lithium metal production elsewhere in the world. Given the measured concentration and estimated volume of brine in the formation, there could be between 5 million and 19 million tons of lithium in the formation; even at the lower end of the range, that’s enough to build nine times the number of EV batteries needed.

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Swapping Vinyl For Cardboard With This ESP32 Turntable

June 30, 2024 by 15 Comments

Cardboard is a surprisingly durable material, especially in its corrugated form. It’s extremely lightweight for its strength, is easy to work, can be folded and formed into almost any shape, is incredibly inexpensive, and when it has done its duty it can be recycled back into more paper. For these reasons, it’s often used in packaging material but it can be used to build all kinds of things outside of ensuring that products arrive at their locations safely. This working cardboard record player is one example.

While the turntable doesn’t have working records in the sense that the music is etched into them like vinyl, each has its own RFID chip embedded that allows the ESP32 in the turntable’s body to identify them. Each record corresponds to a song stored on an SD card that instructs the ESP32 to play the appropriate song. It also takes care of spinning the record itself with a small stepper motor. There are a few other details on this build that tie it together too, including a movable needle arm held on with a magnet and a volume slider.

As far as a building material goes, cardboard is fairly underrated in our opinion. Besides small projects like this turntable, we’ve also seen it work as the foundation for a computer, and it even has the strength and durability to be built into a wall or even used as shelving material. And, of course, it’s a great material to use when prototyping new designs.

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Documenting Real Hidden Messages In Music

March 25, 2024 by 22 Comments

During the 1980s, a moral panic swept across the landscape with the mistaken belief that there were Satanic messages hidden in various games, books, and music that at any moment would corrupt the youth of the era and destroy society as we knew it. While completely unfounded, it turns out that there actually were some hidden messages in vinyl records of the time although they’d corrupt children in a different way, largely by getting them interested in computer science. [Dandu] has taken to collecting these historic artifacts, preserving the music and the software on various hidden recordings.

While it was possible to record only programs or other data to vinyl, much in the same way that cassette tapes can be used as a storage medium, [Dandu]’s research focuses mostly on records, tapes, and CDs which had data included alongside music. This includes not only messages or images, but often entire computer programs. In some cases these programs were meant to be used with the accompanying music, as was the case for The Other Side Of Heaven by Kissing The Pink with a program for the BBC Micro. Plenty of other contemporary machines are represented here too including the ZX Spectrum, Atari, Apple II, and the Commodore 64. The documentation extends through the CD era and even into modern music platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

The process of extraction and recovery is detailed for each discovery, making it a comprehensive resource for retro computing enthusiasts stretching from the 80s to now. There are likely a few hidden pieces of data out there hidden in various antique storage media that [Dandu] hasn’t found yet, either. You could even make your own records with hidden programs provided you have some musical and programming talents, and a laser engraver for the record itself.

Stream Vinyl To Your Sonos Without The Financial Penalty

November 13, 2023 by 47 Comments

One of the unexpected success stories in the world of hi-fi over the past decade has been the resurgence of the vinyl LP as a musical format. What was once old hat is now cool again, but for freshy minted vinyl fans there’s a snag. Hi-fi itself has moved on from the analogue into the digital, so what can be done if your listening comes through a Sonos system. Sonos will sell you a box to do that of course, but it’s as overpriced as 2023-pressing vinyl. [Max Fischer] has a far better solution, in the form of a Raspberry Pi loaded with open source software.

At the vinyl end is a Behringer audio interface containing a pre-amp with the required RIAA response curve. This acts as the source for the DarkIce audio streamer and the IceCast2 media serer, all of which even with the cost of a Pi and the interface, is considerably less than the commercial device.

We’re guessing that a more humble interface coupled to an older RIAA pre-amp could cut the cost further, and we’d be hugely curious as to whether a simple mic pre-amp could be used alongside some DSP from the likes of Gnu Radio to give the RIAA response.

Either way, he’s made a handy device for any 21st-century vinyl fan. Meanwhile if you’re one of the streaming generation seduced by round plastic discs, we’ve gone into some detail about their audiophile credentials in the past. And if you have found yourself a turntable, of course you’ll need to know how to set it up properly.

Vinyl Sales Ran Circles Around CDs In 2022

March 21, 2023 by 108 Comments

How do you take your music these days? For those in Camp Tangible, it seems our ranks are certainly growing, and in the analog direction. For the first time since 1987, vinyl record sales have outperformed CD sales in the US, according to a new report. The CD, which saved us all from the cassette, was a digital revolution in music. But for some, the love was lost somewhere among the ones and zeroes.

Those who prefer pure analog troughs of sound cut into wax have never given up on vinyl, and the real ones probably gobbled up a bunch of it in the 90s when everybody was CD-crazy. But mind you these aren’t used vinyl sales we’re talking about, which means that enough new vinyl has to have been readily available for purchase for quite some time now. Although it doesn’t really seem like that long, new vinyl’s been back for almost 20 years — and according to the report, 2022 was the 16th consecutive year of growth for record sales.

So Why Vinyl?

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, but there was a time in my 1980s childhood when vinyl was all this scribe had to listen to. I have historically been a bit slow to adopt new music formats — I didn’t have a CD player until 1998, and it was given to me for my birthday. I was excited to get the thing, mind you, especially since it had 10 seconds of anti-skip protection (which of course was a huge concern with portable CD players).

But CDs are way different from records. Sure, they’re both round, but the similarities sort of end there. For one thing, the artwork is disappointingly small compared to vinyl. And the whole gatefold album cover thing isn’t really possible with a CD, unless you forego the jewel case and release it in a chintzy little cardboard jacket. But then people will have this one disc that’s four times thinner than the rest and it throws everything off in the collection.

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