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Excellent April’s fool joke, but man it would be sick if you could actually 3D print your own vinyls.
There was a hackaday where someone did that…but it was terrible audio quality from what I remember. Cool idea though.
terrible audio quality
so, a perfect vinyl reproduction then.
Isn’t that pretty much the consensus that vinyls have the best sound…?
AFAIK no, audiophiles can be very opinionated though. Definitely do your own research cause I’m a noob.
Vinyls are analog, which means they (more or less) directly convert imprint the waveforms of the recording onto the physical vinyl. In theory, this should create the best quality recording, but in practice physics gets in the way and it will not sound exactly the same. Digital on the other hand converts the analog waves into digital ones and zeros and most digital music is heavily compressed meaning it uses maths to approximate the original recording. However, lossless digital formats (FLAC) exist which theoretically lose no information from the original recording.
I’m not sure it’s possible to compare digital/analog quality but I would guess that you would get better sound quality from a vinyl than say Spotify, but better quality from a lossless file than vinyl.
In my non-expert experience, by the time you get to lossless/vinyl quality you are far more restricted by your audio equipment than by the format, and only experts would be able to tell a difference in quality.
Spotify and other such services almost certainly sound worse because they are compressed. But it’s not really a like for like comparison with vinyl. Spotify is streaming audio for people who want to play music casually in cars, earbuds etc. It offers convenience, not perfect sound fidelity. FLAC / CD on the other hand could be compared to vinyl and would win hands down for better frequency and range. The only reason they wouldn’t is if the CD master sucked and the vinyl master didn’t.
And vinyl is very lossy in its own way. The (digital) master of each side undergoes dynamic range & frequency compression to fit the limitations of the format (e.g. to reduce sibilance, track width). Then the master is cut into a lacquer disc from which a “father” is made, from which “mothers” are made, from which stampers are made and from which the vinyl record is made. So the vinyl in someone’s hand is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of an altered digital master. The stamper too wears out so if someone is unlucky they get a pressing right the end of its life. And playing the disk can cause wow, flutter, distortion and general wear & tear can cause hiss, pop, dullness and scratches.
So vinyl will never sound better unless it received a better master than other formats.
I fuckin love vinyls, they’re beautiful, fragile, tangible, massive objects, but this is bullshit propagated by audiophile circle jerk who believe they need to break-in their $100000 solid gold oxygen-free gluten-free audio cables to properly align electrons.
It will be much easier with a resin printer but controlling for the microscopic pitch shift that would take place with any amount of shrinkage would probably necessitate a specialty printer.
To say nothing of the fine-tuned resin as well as the curing process. 🤯
