Back in the day, one of the few reasons to prefer compact cassette tape to vinyl was the fact you could record it at home in very good fidelity. Sure, if you had the scratch, you could go out and get a small batch of records made from that tape, but the machinery to do it was expensive and not always easy to come by, depending where you lived. That goes double today, but we’re in the middle of a vinyl renaissance! [ronald] wanted to make records, but was unable to find a lathe, so decided to take matters into his own hands, and build his own vinyl record cutting lathe.

It seems like it should be a simple problem, at least in concept: wiggle an engraving needle to scratch grooves in plastic. Of course for a stereo record, the wiggling needs to be two-axis, and for stereo HiFi you need that wiggling to be very precise over a very large range of frequencies (7 Hz to 50 kHz, to match the pros). Then of course there’s the question of how you’re controlling the wiggling of this engraving needle. (In this case, it’s through a DAC, so technically this is a CNC hack.) As often happens, once you get down to brass tacks (or diamond styluses, as the case may be) the “simple” problem becomes a major project.

The build log discusses some of the challenges faced–for example, [ronald] started with locally made polycarbonate disks that weren’t quite up to the job, so he has resigned himself to purchasing professional vinyl blanks. The power to the cutting head seems to have kept creeping up with each revision: the final version, pictured here, has two 50 W tweeters driving the needle.

That necessitated a better amplifier, which helped improve frequency response. So it goes; the whole project took [ronald] fourteen months, but we’d have to say it looks like it was worth it. It sounds worth it, too; [ronald] provides audio samples; check one out below.  Every garage band in Queensland is going to be beating a path to [ronald’s] door to get their jam sessions cut into “real” records, unless they agree that physical media deserved to die.

 

Despite the supposedly well-deserved death of physical media, this isn’t the first record cutter we have featured. If you’d rather copy records than cut them, we have that too. There’s also the other kind of vinyl cutter, which might be more your speed.