Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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PC Vinyl Burner

cut 5" records right in your PC
  (+29, -3)(+29, -3)(+29, -3)
(+29, -3)
  [vote for,
against]

Perfect for all you home DJs, vinyl purists and electronic music producers - mounted in a spare drive bay in your PC is a minature record lathe, which "burns" audio into 5" vinyl or acetate blanks.
BunsenHoneydew, Aug 25 2002

(??) Untrue http://www.cs.man.a...bin/elsie2?w+LP-ROM
(from Dave's Web of Lies) [-alx, Aug 27 2002, last modified Oct 05 2004]

(??) really really untrue http://www.cs.man.a...d-bin/elsie2?w+Kray
[gniterobot, Sep 01 2002, last modified Oct 05 2004]

(???) Vestax Lathe http://www.vestax.c...roducts/vrx2000.htm
[BunsenHoneydew, Sep 24 2002, last modified Oct 05 2004]

Close... http://www.audiocub...ner_Gramophone.html
novelty gramophone records onto waste CDs [BunsenHoneydew, May 03 2005]

An example from the baked-world http://www.getinthe...ctItem&nProdID=1101
Record->USB [monojohnny, Jul 31 2006]

Gakken mini record lathe https://newatlas.co...mini-record-cutter/
¥8,778 (about US$80). They're even using 5" media :) [BunsenHoneydew, Apr 15 2020]

[link]






       Whip out your little five-inch... record
thumbwax, Aug 25 2002
  

       Cool, except all the little vinyl turnings are going to make quite a mess of the stuff in your other bays.   

       Btw, my son saw this and thought it was cool too, so you probably have a market amongst the MP3 set.
DrCurry, Aug 26 2002
  

       Can I have one please?
NickTheGreat, Aug 26 2002
  

       they do make one, but i hear that it is rather expensive, like $5,000 or $13,000, i don't remember, sry.
cods, Aug 26 2002
  

       Vinyl purists will note that records of olde were pressed from a master, not burned or etched as your idea suggests.
waugsqueke, Aug 26 2002
  

       God, I love vinyl. If I could vote for this idea 10 times it wouldn't be enough.
AfroAssault, Aug 27 2002
  

       Waugsqueke: Yes, this is true for large runs, but single cuts are not unheard of in the DJ scene. Adds to the cachet: "Yeah, genuine one off mate, sorted"   

       Further to this idea, and part-answer to DrCurry's objections about vinyl scurf invading your PC: Perhaps the burner could be similar to a CD burner, only with a stronger laser.   

       The blanks could be a once-only thermoplastic, that deforms under the heat of the laser, and then sets. Rather than the binary, on-off modulation of the CD laser, the beam is modulated by the continuously varying analogue voltage of the audio signal.
BunsenHoneydew, Aug 31 2002
  

       Oh, you'll hate me for this, UnaBubba:   

       Re your Untrue on the LP-ROM: I once saw a UK electronic- musician's magazine from the early eighties which came with a flexi disk LP of reader demos etc. Track one *was* data, encoded as audio, and the magazine included a circuit diagram for plugging your turntable into the tape port of, I think, a ZX-81 or a Spectrum
BunsenHoneydew, Aug 31 2002
  

       OK now I'm on a roll:   

       If the plastic for the blanks was not thermosetting, you could make them re-writeable by running them through a hot roller dooby.   

       Don't leave them on the dashboard on a hot day, though...   

       That's it, I'm off to bed
BunsenHoneydew, Aug 31 2002
  

       //a ZX-81 or a Spectrum//   

       same thing...
yamahito, Aug 31 2002
  

       I picture this as more of an external device...perhaps the shavings then wouldn't be so much of a problem. A laser might be a cheaper approach, anything else would probably be grossly overpriced, as [cods] noted.
BinaryCookies, Sep 01 2002
  

       What a beautiful idea. I have long yearned to burn my minidiscs onto vinyl, even to flimsy cereal box flexidiscs, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's the fact that digital discs can 'go bad' all at once, but a good record player can plow right through scratches.
tharsaile, Sep 01 2002
  

       Had both ZX-81 and Sinclair Spectrum (Spectrum Plus, no less - it had a weird hoojamaflip add-on that fitted on the bottom/back of the keyboard). Quite different: ZX-81 had piss-poor touch-sensitive "keys" marked out on it, whereas the Spectrum had real 3D rubber keys that you could actually press down and everything. Plus what Rods Tiger said about colour. Programming for my Spectrum as a little kiddie was where I first came across the word "cyan", and I've been rather fond of it ever since. Cyan... cyan... it's got a lovely ring to it. Not as flouncy as "cerulean", not as pompous as "azure".   

       Oh, and croissant for the idea.
Guy Fox, Sep 01 2002
  

       outstanding idea, Bunsen. Run don't walk run & invest in the firm who'll make these.   

       (Firm who? Firm that?)
General Washington, Sep 01 2002
  

       An EZ Bake oven will do this.
jimk, Sep 03 2002
  

       What types of graphics did people manage on the ZX-81 I wonder? A 1K version wouldn't have much potential, but it would seem that with the expansion pack there would be some interesting possibilities ("officially" the ZX81 only supports a 32x24 text screen, using 2x2 "block" characters for graphics, but "officially" the Atari 2600 only supports two player objects, two missle objects, a "ball", and a single-color 20-pixel playfield which can appear identically on the left and right sides of the screen, or can appear with the right side reflected.
supercat, Sep 03 2002
  

       Cods: the item you are describing is probably the home lathe made by Vestax. It retails here for $13,000 AU - about $6,000 US. The blanks are said to have "90%" of the durability of commercial vinyl.
BunsenHoneydew, Sep 24 2002
  

       WWII
thumbwax, Sep 26 2002
  

       Hey [Rods] - you're the only person I know to have bought a Jupiter Ace - that was the one you had to program in FORTH wasn't it?
Re the ZX81 - it did have 1k of memory (on 4 256b chips!), like the ZX80 which I had. The ZX81 though was expandable to a gargantuan 16k.
hippo, Nov 01 2002
  

       I have a SoundScriber Dictaphone. It takes green cellulose acetate records and embosses a groove into it. It only records in mono and it sounds pretty bad since I have no green records and instead use other plastics. I have tried a hard disk platter and have got pretty good sound from it. What would be cool would be to implement this in a PC Drive Bay and make it record in stereo. You could get 7-1/2 minutes on one side of a 4 inch record. Depending on how cheap you are, you could use anything from blister pack plastic to transparencies to the actual high fidelity green records.
Amishman35, Nov 30 2003
  

       Finaly, A use for those AOL CDs!!
my-nep, Apr 08 2004
  

       Actually, cast-off CDs might not be a bad medium for this.   

       Further thoughts on etching:   

       Coat discs with photoresist, expose with UV laser, then etch in PCB chemicals.   

       If using a laser to burn directly into the disc surface, it would possibly have to record at less than 1x, to allow time for the heating an cooling of the plastic.   

       Better to use the digital audio stream directly to control the power of the laser, than to convert to voltage first. The fewer conversions the better.
BunsenHoneydew, Oct 28 2004
  

       There was a drive a few weeks back to identify previous half-baked ideas that have materialised into the baked world...   

       This is one of them !   

       Congratulations ! [+]   

       Adding link...   

       (Just realised it isn't the same idea at all, oops - but still great)
monojohnny, Jul 31 2006
  

       Not to be nit-picky, but I believe when making a single record, the term is "Cut" rather than "burn."   

       My dad still "cuts" his DVDs, and says if it was good enough for records, it's good enough for CDs.
ye_river_xiv, Jul 31 2006
  

       All good things come to those who wait   

       [link]
BunsenHoneydew, Apr 15 2020
  
      
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