Phonocut.. Home Vinyl Recorder

Ever fancied having your own electronic tracks converted to vinyl from your bedroom. Hope this one materializes soon.

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They more than doubled their KS goal and there is still 20 days left, so they’ll be funded and short of disaster the Phonocut will be made.

IMO: Adding the cost of the machine, plus the cost of the blanks together, will make the per disk cost a little pricey – but compared to services that make them for you it’s not too bad, once you get by the initial cost of this unit. I think the idea of making totally unique one-off discs is good, especially if you record a performance live. But any sort of bulk beyond 5 to 10 is probably not reasonable. It’s only a 10 inch vinyl with 10 - 15 minutes max time too. You can record on both sides though – so you can make a B cut.

A little surprised it doesn’t look like it has a balanced inputs! It is stereo though, i think.

I think a good use for this would also be if you still do real-vinyl scratch DJing. Putting together your own music for that would be useful. The recorder adds a certain presence to the sound too.

You certainly could add this sort of presence in other ways but it’s worth a listen here at the demo from the KS page. This is a prototype, not production version of the Phonocut obviously, but the final will probably be pretty similar.

  • Sec. 1-10: the digital record file
  • Sec. 11-22: the pressed vinyl record, traditionally produced from a cut made by a professional Scully lathe
  • Sec. 23-35: the record we directly cut in the studio on vinyl with our brave little PHONOCUT machine
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I love this. Not need it. Maybe when I retire.

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I think if you could get four or more agreeable people together to share the cost and use of this it would make more sense.

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True that.

Would people buy one-off vinyl recordings at a concert for $30 - $40? I don’t know if a front of house person could handle a mix and make recordings too, but if so it would add a revenue to performers and be a perk for people in the audience.

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I just imagine our kids fooling around with holograms and virtual art installations and … daddy is printing his own mediocre sounds on …vinyl :checkered_flag: :cool:

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I wish i wasnt broke. That is REALLY cool!
Id LOVE one!

This is a really cool “must have:don’t need” piece!

I wonder what the sound will be like for average joe’s recordings. I believe that its a different mastering that’s needed to get the best sound out of vinyl as opposed to for digital, and things like the depth of the cut etc, theres a real skill and science behind the cut.
Wonder if/how this machine compensates?

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It’s a cool piece but I’d imagine it just bangs it out no special treatment. A bit like that website you upload your tracks to and it automatically “masters” it. That said this would be ace for scratchers if you’ve got the bags for it

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Pressing plants, decent ones, have skilled engineers and processes to produce high quality vinyl releases. I’d say this would be ok but nothing like a properly pressed 12”

Also the vinyl are 5-6 euro with Kickstarter offer price so probably cost 8-10 when released. Expensive enough.

Cool though for making one offs just to own your tracks

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Correct. These vinyl plants have engineers with a master in EQ and compressor. They also will put the chain through some hi end AD converters. All that gets pushed into a pressed record.

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This is really driving me into GAS heaven crazy, the RYTM update was not enough :thdw::thup:

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Just cut it from a master 1/4" analog tape recording, assuming your lowend is mono, you’ll be fine. Of course getting a linear HF reproduction to the cut requires a patient hand on a decent EQ, but if the cutter itself isn’t hard to operate, this could be decent for cutting your own dubs.

Interested because custom skratch 10"! Who wouldn’t love that. But how much money we talking about? I aint kickstarting, I can wait until this thing is funded and can be massproduced. You can always make custom dubs via a dubplate service in the meantime… Been burned by kickstarters enough times already.

€2000 retail, had the price of blanks somewhere too but I can’t find it now. It would be so entirely unnecessary but I bet I’d feel like the dogs bollocks for five minutes sat there cutting custom vinyl from a reel to reel

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2000 is doable! Might put one in my future store/shop on a little desk: print your track as a service kind of thingy. Let’s See how good it is and how much time the process takes.

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I think it’s $5 a pop double sided with 10 to 15 minutes per side (i think). Seems that the price could be less on the blanks with any volume – it’s a piece of plastic.

TonyDS: I think selling use of this thing as a service would be a hit!

would be mint that :+1:

For anyone interested in how to cut records in other ways read this.