Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: An analog & digital hybrid disk (Read 3065 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

An analog & digital hybrid disk

"The idea of combining a record and a CD is likely to cause a certain amount of disgust for most people, but that didn’t stop guitarist Yonatan Gat from doing it anyway. His new single comes on a CD that’s been cut with a lathe, meaning A-side ‘Ascension’ plays on a turntable and B-side ‘Analog Gold Rush’ plays in a CD player." ~ www.factmag.com

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  ;~)

An analog & digital hybrid disk

Reply #1 –
Quote from: 2tec on
"The idea of combining a record and a CD is likely to cause a certain amount of disgust for most people, but that didn’t stop guitarist Yonatan Gat from doing it anyway. His new single comes on a CD that’s been cut with a lathe, meaning A-side ‘Ascension’ plays on a turntable and B-side ‘Analog Gold Rush’ plays in a CD player." ~ www.factmag.com


For some reason the polycarbonate used to make CDs has never been favored for making LPs. 

One reason might be that polycarbonate was first discovered in 1953 and probably not much competition for PVC which is the traditional material.

It is probably more expensive, but is obviously capable of being easily fabricated with small details.

Its slightly different mechanical properties may lead to audible differences with at least some cartridges. The major advantage of polycarbonate is that it is about twice as strong as PVC.

An analog & digital hybrid disk

Reply #2 –
Records don't necessarily need to be as thick or as rigid as they are. Back in the 70/80s there were nearly paper-thin ones, called Flexi-discs,  sold or even given away as promotional inserts in magazines, usually the diameter of a typical 45 single [although all that I owned were 33.33 and had the standard center hole]. They were so thin and light that if you were holding a thick magazine you'd be hard pressed to determine by feel alone if it did or did not contain one.

I've owned CD players which were so robust they could even successfully spin and play two CDs stacked on top of each other so this proves they'd also easily spin a CD with a flexi-disc record cut to size and glued to the top. This means combo CD/phono records, made of two materials glued together, could easily be made. [The maximum play time for the phono side would be much shorter, of course, but could hold one song or so.]

An analog & digital hybrid disk

Reply #4 –
In pre-internet days distributing music or other sounds quickly, easily, and cheaply to the masses was unheard of. Flexi-disc gave us that. The thin flimsy plastic sheets were so light that they often needed a coin or other weight to be placed on top to weight them down on the record player platter so they wouldn't slip.

In terms of cultural significance their invention inadvertently helped solve the most significant crime of the 20th century: JFK's assassination!

In the motorcade which flanked JFK's limo there was a cop on a motorcycle who accidentally had his microphone's transmit button jammed in. The audio was automatically recorded on a dictabelt machine at police headquarters. Although the audio quality was horrible this gave us an audio recording of the gunfire sequence which was then synch'd to the Zapruder film.

Oliver Stone's horribly distorted film JFK, largely an admitted work of [partial] fiction, completely ignores this crucial evidence. What the audio mic recorded is not nearly as important as the position the US government concluded from it: that based on the gunfire sequence timing there had to have been a second gunman besides Oswald. For a short period of time in history the official policy of the US government was: "We don't know the exact details, and while most (but not all) of the evidence, including witnesses, supports a single gunman, based on the forensic analysis of the unbiased and indisputable audio recording by the prestigious research firm of Bolt, Baranek, and Newman [BBN], tops in their field, and with 90-95% certainty, we now believe the Warren Commision was mistaken and the assassination was a conspiracy of two or more gunmen." [paraphrased, not an actual quote]

Why is this so important? It's that if presented with compelling evidence the US government would admit there was a conspiracy in this saga! In fact they did just that. This shows they can't be part of some supposed, massive, multi-jurisdictional cover up, themselves.

All was fine and dandy for perhaps a year or so when for whatever reason a US girlie magazine [soft core porn] decided to release the audio publically on an included flexi-disc bound into their magazine, just for kicks. Now instead of just a handful of top scientists getting to hear it instead thousands of average Joes could hear it themselves for the first time. A nobody rock drummer listened to it, using headphones, and heard something on it that nobody else noticed: print through. [Actually on a dictabelt machine you might call it "adjacent track cross talk", but it's the same idea].

The gunfire sequence that the people at BBN had analyzed was actually both the original event and a faint, out of synch faint echo layered over it, due to the machine's leakage. [This medium predates cassette and was never meant for high quality]. Turns out Oswald's firing sequence was nothing out of the ordinary and could easily be replicated by other single gunman, in fact it has been by people in their 70's using the same rifle at the same distance.

So don't knock the Flexi-disc. It has an important role in US history.

An analog & digital hybrid disk

Reply #5 –
Quote from: mzil on
Turns out Oswald's firing sequence was nothing out of the ordinary and could easily be replicated by other single gunman


Heywaitaminute. You forgot "with the same high fidelity equipment known for its near-magical soundstage" 

I didn't know about the flexi, but the Wikipedia article was only a googling away.

An analog & digital hybrid disk

Reply #6 –
Magazines used to give away flexidiscs every now and then, and I owned a few - everything from Private Eye to Smash Hits!, to some American Guitar magazine. Some actually had a printed circle next to the spindle hole, to show you where to rest a coin.

Recently, I found the discs, but they had got damaged, so I had to chuck them.

An analog & digital hybrid disk

Reply #7 –
They were also cheaper to produce, because they were stamped rather than pressed. (A hot stamper was pressed into a plastic sheet, rather than moulding a slug of plastic between hot plates.)
Regards,
   Don Hills
"People hear what they see." - Doris Day