It’s no secret that here at Hackaday we’ve at times been tempted to poke fun at the world of audiophiles, a place where engineering sometimes takes second place to outright silliness. But when a high quality audio project comes along that brings some serious engineering to the table we’re all there for it, so when we saw [Slyka] had published the files for their open source record lathe, we knew it had to be time to bring it to you.
Truth be told we’ve been following this project for quite a while as they present tantalizing glimpses of it on social media, so while as they observe, documentation is hard, it should still be enough for anyone willing to try cutting their own recordings to get started. There’s the lathe itself, the controller, the software, and a tool for mapping EQ curves. It cuts in polycarbonate, though sadly there doesn’t seem to be a sound sample online for us to judge.
If you’re hungry for more this certainly isn’t the first record lathe we’ve brought you, and meanwhile we’ve gone a little deeper into the mystique surrounding vinyl.
Is it me or is the website hosting this project a bit obscure? Regarding the project/concept, cool very cool and although the basics are pretty straight forward, there are so many things you can do wrong this project isn’t as easy as some people make it look. Like to see hear more of it / about it. Please keep us posted.
SourceHut is just a really good github alternative that you can selfhost if you desire (I’m locked in with Gitea myself unfortunately)
That’s what I’m thinking. There are some files available but no assembly instructions, no “general” concept or not even sound samples.
I don’t know what’s the point. Does the author think someone would actually build one from that information?
I found his website here but it doesn’t really provide any more info either: https://slyka.net/projects/record-lathe/
FWIW, as much as I enjoy poking (harshly some time) fun at the audiophools who pay £300 for a fuse or some other piece of fairy dust sprinkled woo, I absolutely admire the real engineering of high end audio systems and this project is pretty incredible.
Interesting project, and at least the one CAD file I looked at was really elegantly done with a reasonable quantity of labels on the parts! So source really available and actually really workable should you get involved and want to make changes unlike some ‘open source’ that just provides the model mesh.