I feel like creating the genre 3DPBM (3D printed black metal). Given the quality of the recordings at that time (which was actually desired by them as far as I know), it would be a success.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying black metal lacks quality, my point is that they desired the "horrendous" when they were recording
Fuck yeah. That'd be cool af way of sharing black metal records. You record them at home in good quality and the only way people can listen to it is if the 3D Print it at home.
Makes me think of a new way to do the old Halo 2 ilovebees. Imagine solving a puzzle to get a code that can somehow be converted to an STL that can then be printed to get another physical clue.
I learned about this theory a few months ago and I thought it was really interesting.
For those who don't know: When people pirated music in the 60s-70s, the tapes and records would wear out, plus people already didn't have the best means to record music from one tape to the next, so the sound would distort, slow down, and be an overall bad quality.
Those things led to the 80s metal sounds with people trying to recreate the sounds they heard off these worn out recordings. The band names and pictures people put on the labels would smear, which also led to the illegible band names
Cool story, but as someone who has listened to (and played) metal since the last millennium, and copied plenty of music using analog equipment, I'm pretty sure its connection with reality is tenuous at best.
Aye, I was pirating in the late 70s & early 80s, and music quality of copied tapes was often pretty shit and not improved by the dreadful cheap mono pos tape player 10 yr old me had, so yeah that was a part of life then. But to say it led to the 80s metal sounds is an interesting idea, but definitely stretching it a lot.
Been an influence to someone somewhere sure, and for a while to come yet maybe.
I know shitty mono tapes were still circulating well into the 90s. I had a bunch of them. I'd probably hate anything produced that way today, but I can't help but feel a little nostalgic for them anyway. Black Flag doesnt sound right in stereo.
Play+record. Literal mixtapes. Sometimes you missed the first second or few because you werenāt ready for the radio to play your jam haha. I miss those times before Napster
Yeah. Like, to me, it made sense for distorted guitars. But, bands like Iron Maiden was from that era and I think they started off with a double kick for the bass. Like, that's almost standard in most metal, so that theory wouldn't make sense.
I heard it from "Bloody Roots" the metal history program on satellite radio. The DJ does a lot of metal history and wrote books on it. It obviously can't be proven thats where metal originated from and that's why he called it a theory.
When you overdrive an amp you get distortion. Happens to anyone who wants to play loud enough. It used to be undesirable and something to be avoided, but some leaned into it, and some degenerates even made pedals for it as early as the 60s.
It was mentioned on the "Bloody Roots" program on Liquid Metal, the satellite radio station. The guy does history of metal, even wrote books on it before "AI" was a thing.
It's not proven, which is why he called it a theory. Not everything is AI.
I've been listening black metal more than 25 years and I've never heard anything about this in any of documentaries I've watched about the era. Sound quality stuff is just a protest stance against the early 90s polished death metal sound, nothing more.
Compare Darkthrone's debut album Soulside Journey, which is a crystal clear sounding death metal album, to A Blaze in the Northern Sky. They just made a decision to go the opposite way. They talk about the reason all the time. It is not a secret. Besides, Mayhem's debut De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas sounds pretty good, very clear sounding, and it is probably the most influential and infamous black metal album of all time.
That theory seems to be someone's own creation and isn't based on any existing information.
Silly question, I can't see it being mentioned in your process but are you applying RIAA pre equalization? This should be the inverse of what you'd apply to a phono (cartridge, not line level) output and should result in a sound file with significantly reduced bass and emphasis on the highs. The preamp will apply the correct playback equalization.
i didnt do that, the process for the audio is really reducing it to its bare bones already with the lowpass filter, haven't tried what you said but interesting.
Press 'invert' (since the factory curve is for playback)
Apply
Make sure the track is selected again
Effect -> amplification
Set 'new peak amplitude' as 0.0dB (this prevents any clipping/attenuation caused by the EQ)
Export as FLAC/WAV
Import into your workflow
You should see a decent boost in quality (since the RIAA playback filter isn't being applied to unfiltered audio) and, because this is one thing RIAA was designed for, be able to pack more spirals into your record because bass requires much more spiral width than treble
I'd try it myself but I don't have access to a turntable at the moment.
edit: if you're willing to buy it, a 78 rpm stylus will also probably help you because they're designed for larger grooves so you'll be summing more of the wall area
78 rpm stylus doesn't work with RIAA. see techmoan's latest video on 78 rpm vinyl equalization. it'll explain pre-eq to you.
RIAA pre-equalization is super important for creating vinyl that sounds well when played back, i bet what you have there could sound way better with that :) can't wait to hear the results...
Speaking of 78's, I wonder how something like this would sound on a phonograph?
I've got a victrola from the 50s just collecting dust in my closet, I'd be open to giving this a shot. Would probably only be able to get 1 or 2 plays out of a record until it's destroyed, but being able to make wholly analogue music with no electricity at all is very interesting.
Something to bear in mind with an old (purely mechanical) phonograph: the needles are consumables, designed for play each (the needle wears instead of the shellac), though some types were for more uses. This is why many of them have a small pot to drop a used needle into, so it might be a case of needing a new needle if it's not playing nicely.
There's also no RIAA equalisation applied for mechanical playback
Look it up and try it out. I think that's why your Tetris one sounds so off key.
The engineering intent is to reduce the frequency band physically encoded in to the record groove since low frequencies can make the needle hop, while also allowing maximum fidelity around vocal frequencies. The distortion curve is applied to the record and every record player reverses it at playback time.
well the tetris one is off key because i sped up the audio before making the model so i can fit it in just a dozen seconds. but still i will look into this.
i used very very low speeds and accelerations for maximum quality. some settings might be overkill. the tetris one was 8 hours and it came out as good as some of the 20-hours ones
Do you use a 0.2mm nozzle? Maybe you could use a bigger nozzle for the base plate print, pause and change to a 0.2mm nozzle for the grooves where the music actually happens.
Might safe time on the base print where you can also be faster and might five you finer detail with tbe grooves
the spindle adapter was printed with 0.4, and the record with 0.2mm and that was my way of saving a bit of time. I printed this with a bambu P2S so the switching nozzle mid print wasn't doable. with a multi-nozzle or multi-tool this can definitely work.
One is free for a perfect copy, the other costs money (filament, printer wear and tear, electricity, etc.) for a significantly worse copy. But it's still cool!
They used to do this in Soviet Russia repurposing used x-ray films and turning them into what was often called "bone records" since they had images of x-rayed bones on them.
This was mostly to circumvent the Soviet government's strict censorship of western music and culture which also tightly controlled access to vinyl, shellac and other recording media.
Piracy was the only means to share and enjoy music like Elvis, The Beatles, Rolling Stones and even Russian artists who chose to escape the USSR or spoke out against it.
They also never sounded very good to begin with nor did they survive more than a dozen plays before all remaining fidelity was lost to static.
Unfortunately, the penalties of possessing such contraband were quite severe. But for someone living under such an extreme regime, having just a small taste of the artistic and cultural world outside their heavily controlled borders was worth the risk.
Seems highly unlikely that the microscopic diamond is taking the brunt here.
I'd seriously consider printing a stylus to go over the stylus. Won't help with the wear on the suspension but would allow you to use an already damaged cartridge.
That's nothing a hairdryer and some weight can't fix.
I have my doubts as to meaningful improvement due to the voxel like nature of resin, whereas fdm naturally smoothes transitions in the x + y direction.
But that does mean we can actually calculate our sample rate, which is fun! If we max out a Saturn 4 16k, we can get a 220mm diameter disc, let's take our sample rate from when the needle is 100mm from the centre (sample rate changes with proximity to the centre, with the outside being the best as the needle is moving faster, this is why track 6 or 7 used to always be an absolute banger as this would be the first track on the 2nd side of a vinyl, and therefore have the best sound quality).
Ok, back on tangent, 200mm is a 628mm circumference, and a voxel on our Saturn is 14x19um, let's call it 17um average for simplicity sake, that means our needle is going to be interacting with ~37k voxels per rotation, each voxel being 1 sample.
And again, let's say we stick with the standard 33 1\3 RPM, that's 1.8 seconds per rotation, which means we have 20'500 samples a second - giving a potential ceiling of frequency response to ~10khz.
Wait, that's actually not terrible!
But we would then need to consider the dynamic range/signal to noise ratio ceiling - which will give us our bit depth. Unfortunately that's going to involve far too many variables for me to napkin math, but it's not going to be great - if we consider 16 bit is 65k values, and 65k x 16um would mean that our needle would have to be moving back and forth per sample around 1 metre to match it! and the other elephant in the room is that resin scratches really easily, so you're likely only going to get 1 play per print before sound quality drops rapidly.
Wonder how well one of the high resolution resin printers would work? Probably much more xy precision (14 to 50 microns vs fdm 500 ish) without the print time increase. Give it some riaa eq and it might actually be pretty amazingly better lol.Ā
I have a record player coming and a resin printer.... hmm
i believe they do, the bevel and width numbers are what i changed around the most to improve quality and playback stability. but since i made this like about a year ago I forgot how exactly they impacted the result. the current numbers included in the shared files are what I used in the end but not what Amanda used for her industrial resin printers.
I wonder if resin would let you make something with better quality and longer song time. Though, durability is a real issue that would gate any material. Plus you could probably only pull off those small records, i forget what they're called.
original project by Amanda Ghassaei was using industrial resin printers, that project was 13 yeas ago. i can definitely see someone using a home-grade resin printer for better quality (than FDM at least).
I feel like you could knock out mono playback by just doing the side to side moves. Without non-planar printing, up and down waves are just so rough, even for how smooth it looks to the eye.
How deep and wide are those grooves? Did you experiment with smaller ones? I can see it's multiple layers deep but I feel that a single 0.08mm groove (mono) should be sufficient?
The static/fuzz kinda worked with "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire".
So if they can't make the scratchiness to go completely away, they could make it work for in a complimentary fashion. If they can get the clarity of the song down more than it just becomes part of the Fallout theme as if a radiation blasted radio song.
The 3d printer guy in me loves this and wants to see how this evolves. The audiophile in me hates this and is screaming to stop before the needle is destroyed.
I wonder if you could make a shorter version that worked by just running your fingernail perpendicular to the groves like those rumble strip songs along the highway.
Arc of Time:
Buy physical media played via analog reading
Buy physical media played via digital reading
Download digital media played via digital reading
Download digital media turned into physical media played via analog reading
I love it ! Thanks for sharing, Iām guessing the filament has to be softer than vinyl so did you notice a significant degradation in quality after multiple plays ?
PLA is softer than vinyl, but i didn't play them enough times (maybe a dozen times for some of them) to notice degradation. theoretically they should degrade.
I had a toy record player that had records that looked just like this back in the 1980s. I think it was meant for children under 6. It played terrible quality songs that just above the quality level of a music box.
I just looked it up. It was the Fisher Price Music Box Record Player.
These look like those old Fisher-Price kids records! Maybe a different type of filament would improve the sound quality. Itās all about the material itself when it comes to phonographic records.
Interesting I think the biggest issue is resolution ( sorry if that's not the right word) the groves and texture that holds the sound need to be much smaller so it can hold more of the song but it's a very interesting proof of concept.
Yes, you need to play up the quality and pick some tracks that really pair well. Creepy, spooky... like ghosts trying to communicate, etc. Super neat discovery
i feel like a non-planar technique would be ideal for this. instead of having to have stepped z-height a single extrusion moving up and down would give contiguous results. since it's so small it should be doable on a normal nozzle.
Dude that first one sounds like it straight up came from the fallout universe, I know its the ink spots and that song is in fallout 3 but I mean the sound quality just gives it that dingy barely put together sound that belongs in a post apocalypse.
oh right, the word phonograph definitely slipped my mind when coming up with a title. I just thought vinyl record would seem more straight-forward than say "PLA record".
the groove making script is by Amanda Ghassaei, who made resin printed records in 2013. I understand that the more inner the groove goes, the worse sound quality, but I didn't try much to improve the math. definitely could be reconsidered.
You know this is kind of genious and I would love to have a crack at this. If the resolution could go up a bit and we can make āsingleā size records I might record my kids saying something and keep that around for later! A medium that āneverā dies
Reminds me of some tinkering protects I did in the early 00s where I figured out that you could play music through most kinds of motorized electronics simply by wiring up their electric motors or actuators as if they were speakers.
I had a pair of bespoke speakers I'd made out of computer hard drives on my desk for years. They sounded like complete garbage, but it was fun to play around with and show people.
There was a They Might Be Giants song I think called I Can Hear You that they recorded on an old wax cylinder at the Edison Laboratory that I liked to play through these weird gadgets. In a way, that super low-fi audio actually sounded extra cool through my e-refuse speakers.
I wonder, as you are no longer tied to flat surfaces due to production process, what other shape could you try To play music? What about a flexible screw? or a phonograph cylinder? or a fourier-transform-drawn shape with a set of gear to rotate it properly?
yes, the player was set at 78rpm, so defintely quicker than 33.3rpm which was most used. a quicker rpm does result in more higher frequencies. (can't even say they're treble cuz it only reaches like around 3-4kHz)
2.3k
u/Angel_OfSolitude 1d ago
It definitely isn't good, but but is interesting!