APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs
https://teenage.engineering/products/apc-2One thing I didn't realize for a long time is that it turns out that a lot of these machines have a digital stage. To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible. But the spiral isn't fixed, it's adjusted dynamically. Quiet sections can be packed close together. That means that before cutting, the machine needs to know how much physical space it needs for the audio it's about to put on the disk. And that requires a buffer, and that's very often digital. So it turns out there's precious little vinyl out there without a digital step being involved out there.
Not that it matters anyway, since vinyl is a pretty terrible technology, but still, it's kind of funny.
“Look ahead” to determine optimal groove spacing doesn’t have to be done digitally, even though digital makes this much simpler.
I’d guess that musicians and producers using an all-analogue recording / mixing / mastering process where they have zero digital stages to the master tape are very few and far between nowadays. Kevin Shields for one, but he likely has other options for his analogue master disk cutting, and only needs to attend disc cutting once or twice a decade/century.
A transparent digital stage for the master isn’t going to make a huge amount of difference really, and the limited bandwidth of vinyl compared to digital means that the vinyl master has to be squashed and limited regardless.
EDIT- Apparently it was the K-Tel Superstar game
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4521/k-tel-superstar-gam...
You could do it with more than two grooves, just to having them at 360/n degrees apart. You’ll just have to make the groove spacing wider as the number of tracks go off. Of course that comes at the cost of playback tine.
https://www.discogs.com/master/19554-De-La-Soul-Me-Myself-An...
Side 4 has a double groove, which would give you either The Great Escape + Made again (a sort of a happy ending) or The Great Escape + 20 minutes of water sounds (which can be interpreted as the sad ending).
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(Marillion_album)#Vinyl_... (I also have a copy and can confirm indeed it works like that).
Is there a performative and marketing element? sure. But that's the music world, a great deal is performative. We have depended on patrons who want to support the arts and be seen supporting the arts for time immemorial.
FWIW, You can get 100 records + jackets printed professionally for ~$10 a pop.
Gakken toy record cutter is low quality, but costs $160.
I wonder what this would cost. Surely it's impractical for personal use, as marketed.
My spouse bought one on a whim. The quality is ... quite bad. It's a tool for learning about how this works though! So it was a fun little activity. But it really is "just" what it is.
Maybe Teenage Engineering's toy that looks like is exactly the same tech is better. I have my doubts.
Cool project but the opposite of democratization.
Their hours are "2:30 PM to 12 Midnight", I sort of believe... 7 days a week?
Rich will actually answer the phone, and guide you. I've done it a few times (it's an incredibly cool gift). A single record is $12. Extremely worth experiencing it.
I've done it twice and had a great experience, although in the 10X pricing range compared to recordcut.com.
I've used https://www.online-druck.biz/lp-cover.html for the sleeve, but I don't know if they ship internationally.
Damn I would buy this for 50 bucks.
I actually have a project that requires a bunch of custom vinyl, but I am guessing this is not economical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc
I remember to listening to some in my childhood and never understood why the tech was not the standard (relative to the brittle cumbersome vinyls). Maybe the sound quality is worse. Unsure
Even in the age of the internet there's a huge business in people basically taking a "normal" thing from another market and then rebadging it to release as an elevated thing.
Studio neat has a $231 tiny box cutter[2]. OLFA (A "professional" box cutter maker) sells a 2 pack of tiny box cutters that probably are 5x more ergonomic on account of being made to be used instead of to look nice on a website, for $10. [3]
The best version of a thing is likely whatever people who do it all day use. But you can totally make a market for consumers who want "fashionable" things but who don't really get the space.
Studio Neat is a big offender on this honestly... basically all of their stuff have "better" things at least at half the cost just available in random stationary stores. I'm all for wasting money on pens, but at least waste them on good pens!
[0]: https://teenage.engineering/products/po-80
[1]: https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200
[2]: https://www.studioneat.com/products/keen
[3]: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/OLFA-Compact-Knife-Pieces-95B2...
The short blade on top is perfect for breaking the tape to open the box without damaging the contents. Then the mouth can be used for quickly breaking down boxes or cutting shrink wrap. You are just cutting tape, so the blade never wears out.
I cringe every time I see someone using a Stanley knife in a supermarket.
This model is right handed, but they make a lefty too.
If you are frequently opening boxes, that spring-loaded mechanism is going to cause repetitive stress injuries. No competent workplace health and safety employee would approve it.
Also, if you are using a utility knife frequently, you likely have a depth you want to keep it. Say I’m installing carpeting. I want to set the razor at a depth for the shag of carpet I’m working on today and have my blade at that depth until I’m done. With a spring load, the only depth that can easily be set is fully out where I’m pushing it all the way. Any intermediate depths will result in me shaking back and forth trying to hold a constant intermediate pressure.
This is a utility knife for someone rich who uses it for the day’s amazons packages because they think using the blade from their scissors is beneath them.
Fixed blade would be best if you were constantly opening boxes and/or you could set your knife down open. And yes, for doing tasks where you are doing longer or more strenuous cutting (carpet is a great example.)
They money is fun to grouse about, but I thought the complaint about the low utility was the interesting bit.
Other people have linked serious box cutters for "I need to use a box cutter on 100 boxes" cases, and OLFA's small box cutter will work well for a bunch of other stuff (OLFA also has like 20 other form factors all at reasonable prices).
I have several Stanley type box cutters and blade retraction is an infuriating experience on each one because it gets stuck, the lock button gets stuck, it doesn't slide properly, often doesn't click into place, etc. I can definitely see the appeal of an object that is actually designed to work properly.
One of mine got left outside in the garden for an entire winter. One side of the enclosure is sun bleached and I had to replace the blade, but otherwise it still gets used every week and works fine.
[1] This one. None of them have ever failed, I just keep 3 of them in different locations and physically lost (maybe loaned out) one a few years ago. https://www.stanleytools.com/product/10-179/hi-visibility-re...
I’m sure there’s a price at which the vinyl cutter is profitable.
But, like, https://teenage.engineering/store/field-desk
Or maybe the TP-7 is a better example.
They are obviously following the playbook from brands like Supreme. At least in part.
I say this as someone with expertise in a domain they nominally targetted.
Very "cool" looking kit, but: missing basic features, unremarkable in those provided; serious issues rendering it fundamentally inappropriate for its nominal application.
I imagine artists could sell a super-limited (i.e. 1 copy) live recording of a show the second it ends for a premium, especially if they kept the machine on stage and personally packaged and signed it.
No one is buying this for economy’s sake.
Well, Sega gamers for one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c744iD0_fWU
⸻
1. A booth for making records like this plays a role in the plot of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Elvis Presley’s very first recordings were a similar thing, the two sides recorded in a booth to make a singular record to give his mother as a present in 1953.
This isn’t targeting consumers, or even record stores, but record pressing plants.
This is kind of a big deal because this sort of fundamental equipment hasn’t been available new for decades. The vast majority of plants/mastering facilities are using old Scully lathes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Those are getting ever older and harder to source parts for, and with the vinyl boom the number of pressing plants is actually going up.
There’s been a market for this for nearly 30 years (and the rest).
But now mixing is done digitally and playing with vinyl is a mostly lost art and it's trivial to put your own material together into audio files and mix it.
Around here in Toronto area we had a local (Jeff Milligan / "Algorithm") who was famous for absolutely precise beatmatching, and often 4 deck mixing. Very minimal wonky/bleepy techno.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2083209238436343
Where a band with no money might struggle to afford a $1000 minimum run somewhere else, they might be able to make beer money at a show with records made on one of these. Probably not "economical" in the machine may never pay for itself, but somebody rich buying one as a mechanism to promote musicians on a small scale probably makes sense to them.
The exception is their PO series stuff which is actually kind of affordable for what you can get out of them.
I would buy a machine that makes new laserdiscs if it existed, and not because of any economical argument.
... aluminized paper for electric arc printers
... wax film thermal print head ribbon
... a re-inker for cloth typewriter ribbon (at least this one is straightforward to design and build myself some day)
... extra wide cloth matrix printer ribbon with 4 colors
... 1.9mm magnetic tape for exatron wafers
A record cutter has way more potential audience than any of those. They will sell every one they can even manage to make.
This stuff is like expensive watches. If there was no one to show it off to there would be no one who would buy it.
I've been worried this place has gotten eternal september'd full of redditors, AI bots, and low-IQ emotional mainstream political rants.
But then you swoop in here and remind me that it's still 2007 in Hackernews land: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Never change.
https://www.outofrage.net/post/review-henge-journey-to-voltu...
I love this company and wish there was more like them.
It appears they’ll just rebrand a few record cutters and call it a product. TE always comes off as really low quality for the types of prices they charge.
The MPC Sample is 400$ and looks well built, the KO2 is 300$ and has faders falling off.
Roland has a few samplers in the same price range as well.
https://github.com/kallaballa/sndcut.git
Works pretty well, certainly not high quality audio, though. Maybe if someone out there has a more precise laser, it'd work ..
The audio wasn't the best, but hey, you could make your own dubplates, and it did so in stereo!
I wonder if they chose it because of the APC40, which is a delightful set of MIDI pads.
Scrolled down
WTAF
I'm a total TE fanboi, I have the OP1F and OP-XY, they're everything I ever wanted and my MPC and Digitakt haven't be touched in months. And the Digitone Keys is unplugged propped against the bookshelf. It's extraordinary how addictive these two little synths are for making things happen.
The APC-2, however, is a fascinating outcome of what happens when you have a bunch of creative people who like - and can - do things that are new to them and make them new to others. It's no wonder they keep getting asked to do cool stuff like Panic's Playdate, Baidu's Raven, Nothing Smartphones and Headphones.
TE have retained this incredible playful vibe that has long drained from Sony and Apple.
I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.
"God, I'm good," thought the Rolex wearer as he glanced at his wrist.
Hipsters will buy anything that looks cool. But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.
Nobody pretends that high-end watches are anything besides objets d'art and even then not every watch is a Rolex synonymous with conspicuous consumption. TE, on the other hand, has legions of fans that buy this stuff without knowing the first thing about music production just because they think it's cool and want to try it out. Nobody who buys a $700 Tissot thinks it tells better time than a $17 Casio.
I have no problem with any of this. The world needs more aspiring creatives and it's none of my business how these consumers choose to spend their money. The fact that you find it appropriate to unilaterally shit on people who have nice watches while being in possession of a $2000 groovebox is, however, as the kids say, "a choice."
They essentially make toys for that demographic but theres nothing wrong with that if you get enjoyment out of it.
If you re-read your own comment, do you experience cringe? If the answer is no, that's worrying and worth looking into.
"And it's amazingly precise! One look at your wrist and you know exactly how rich you are!"
> TE's amazing inventions
> But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.
How anyone tells themselves this while buying Teenage Engineering gear is beyond me. The closest TE came to an "amazing invention" was the OP-Z, and that flopped like a fish on land. The whole business is a marketing-saturated DAWless hipster fantasy, hook line and sinker.
I was there when my properly talented musician friends bought the original OP-1, and I was also there when they sold it to afford a better MIDI controller. It's a Fischer-Price 4-track recorder, there's a very good reason you don't see your favorite musicians dailying it.
The OP-1 (and TX-6) on the other hand are excellent, I have 3 of them and love them dearly! Plenty of producers and bands still use them to great effect, the used price is evidence of this. Treating it as a controller is a pretty solid sign you've missed the point. Most midi devices are not able to cope with the bpm/playback speed shifting in response to the tape interactions (which is fully in spec). I did appreciate people offloading them for cheap.