vinyl records are one of the few things
that we unite both your dad and the
craft beer drinking beard waxing
hipsters of Shoreditch way over a
hundred years since the technologies
inventions some people still consider
them the only proper way to listen to
music but how do they work
first things first how does the music
get onto the record now I'm sure you've
heard that sound travels in waves sound
waves are simply vibrations in a medium
which is usually air but sound also
travels through vibrations through water
and glass and other mediums too and
those vibrations those waves make their
way to our ears where they then pass on
those vibrations into the tiny bones
that are in there
they set some of the fluid in your inner
ear vibrating and eventually send
electrical signals to the brain okay got
it but at the simplest level a record is
an analog recording of those sound waves
in practice though successfully
recording those waves is very different
from successfully playing them one of
the first records ever made had no way
to playback the music it was the
recording of a song thought to be the
first recording of any human voice at
all
10 seconds of folk singing recorded
visually on what the inventor Edouard
Leon scott de martinville called his
fond autograph Martinville was a
parisian typesetter he used an oil lamp
to blacken sheets of paper then placed a
horn to focus the sounds of the lady
singing towards them her sound waves
move leaves and stylus up and down
fetching the vibrations into the paper
is a really lovely idea although it then
took about 150 years for anyone to
translate those scratches back into
sound and play the lost song today
recording is not usually done direct
discs in that way instead musicians
first record and mix their music until
they're happy with it often on tape but
then it's kind of similar but mixed
sound is played into a record cutting
lathe in real time and the sound waves
move our needle head which then cuts
grooves into a thin like a disc the
depth of those grooves representing the
shape of the sound waves the next steps
to make the final record get kind of
calm
get here to be honest but let's just
simplify that lacquer copy is then used
to make a Stamper a perfect negative
image of the record made a metal with
ridges instead of grooves and then the
Stamper is loaded into a hydraulic
record press pushed into soft vinyl and
then that becomes the record itself and
these stampers can undergo up to a
hundred pounds of pressure and serious
audio files will listen out for the
slight differences from records made
with fresher stampers okay so that's how
you capture those sound waves and how
you make the record but how does playing
them turn those ridges back into sound
well the way records are played has not
really change much since the first
photographs and gramophones you get a
needle and it's usually tipped with
diamond or something else very very hard
and it rests on the record as it spins
on a turntable the grooves contain the
image of the sound waves if you look at
them under an electron microscope they
actually look like tiny bumpy valleys
and I'm going to link to a video showing
that in the footnotes below now as the
record starts to spin the needle moves
across those little grooves and that
moving needle actually moves a small
magnet inside a coil of wire which
induces a fluctuating electric current
and the current travels to a speaker
which then converts those electrical
signals back into kinetic movement
vibrating the speaker cone to reproduce
the sound waves of that original song
which then travel to your ear recreating
the song in all its glory so it's time
for the important question does vinyl
really sound better
well serious collectors may listen out
for the to be magic of vinyl but the
answer here really depends on what you
class as better records have personality
they change with age and playing and
they come with great stories like the
1969 Led Zeppelin album that supposedly
had such dynamic range it would make
record playing needles jump out of their
grooves but a CD and a vinyl record
pulled from the same master tape are at
least at the beginning mathematically
identical and digital music can be
reproduced so much more easily you can
listen to a track recorded by a band on
the other side of the world yesterday
today at the end of the day
it all comes down to what music you
enjoy and how you enjoy listening to it
which is why I'm going to head off and
play some euro trance on the gramophone
we always love hearing from you lots so
let us know in the comments below
what you like listening to and what your
preferred method of listening to it is
maybe it's one of those old-school cups
with a bit of string attached anyway
check out more Brit lab here we'll see
you on the next video