Back up yer vinyl records
By:
30 Jun
2008
9 Comments
 

Here’s the latest in bit-perfect, lossless music encoding: vinyl-to-plastic audio backup.

Now, being a vinyl record nut, I was naturally excited but also aghast to find this backup-yer-vinyl-record tip in blogoshere. Excited because, well, it is a pretty cool notion. Aghast because I can just see all those out-of-print vinyl records being damaged by the gooey silicone stuff. And I am also not so sure about having my delicate record cartridge glide on the finished plastic replica.

Assuming it works, I can just imagine all the nasty crackles and pops from the replica. Anyone tried?

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Tagged in: Music,  
 
  • http://www.mobilephonetracer.net Wiegman

    Mobile Phone Tracer

  • http://lexpress-newspaper.com Deloera

    Really valuable article. I saved it. Good work! Thanks ^_^

  • http://websitedevelopmentanddesign.net Martie

    Hey There I am having a problem seeing your sidebar on my ipad machine.
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  • http://billyteo.livejournal.com/ billy teo

    Yo Boonie!

    just to clarify though…can I quote you on this record-breaking development, or is this strictly off-the-record? : )

  • http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02391640823925307595 Chris

    Hi Robert, I know where you’re coming from, but just to give you a little context here – Boon Kiat’s quite the traditional vinyl enthusiast, and I think he posted this item for its novelty value.

    I agree that the concept’s a bit silly, but I enjoy discussing weird concepts for fun, and taking them to their logical conclusions as a theoretical exercise.

  • http://www.collectingvinylrecords.com/ Robert Benson

    Why in the name of all that is holy would anyone even attempt this inane stunt? To “back up” my vinyl, I record them onto CD, which makes them ‘portable” (you can’t play your records in your car or at the beach) I saw something similar to this, and no I didn’t try it, why take the chance of ruining a perfect good vinyl record? I would be interested if anyone has tried this, and what results that they had. Seems a bit silly to me.

    Regards,
    Robert Benson
    http://www.collectingvinylrecords.com

  • http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02391640823925307595 Chris

    Yeah, “perfect sound forever” my foot. CD rot is probably especially bad in Singapore because of the high humidity. But the quest for a medium that will last forever is probably futile, unless we’re talking about laser-encoding data into diamonds. Even hard drives have fixed life spans, and there’s still no cheap solution for migrating hard drive platters to new mechanisms.

    When you do get around to backing up your records, I predict it will be at resolution more like 32-bit/192kHz. I listened to 24-bit/192kHz Pro Tools master recordings of Randy Newman a decade ago, and recording software was already capable of 32-bit floating point sessions at that time.

  • Boon Kiat

    Remember how the CD medium was being touted by their proponents, when it first appeared in the 1980s, as having “Perfect Sound Forever”? What a joke! I have LPs pressed in 1950s that are in absolutely superb shape, but 10-year-old CDs are rotting away and refusing to be read by disc players. When I get around to backing up my records, it will likely be to a hard drive in high-resolution formats – maybe 24-bit/96kHz encoding.

  • http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02391640823925307595 Chris

    This is one of those concepts that’s so simple I’d have never thought of it. It strikes me as a tad low-tech though, but then again I’m the kind who would rather spend money on a standalone BBE phase corrector than a tube preamp, so I do have a bias for silicon (as opposed to silicone). Even if you did go with this silicone method of backing up your vinyl, I’d still do a digital backup just in case. I’ve been grappling with cracked and moldy CDs lately, and am painfully aware of the fragility of most storage media.