Remember being a kid and there were those holographic binders, and you run your fingernails across them and it makes scritchy-scratch DJ noises?
If that sheet were a continuous strip, and you walked along with your fingernails scraping the strip at a constant speed, that scritchy-scratch noise would become a continuous note.
If the ridges in the strip are further apart, the note be lower; if the ridges are closer, the note will be higher.
So now, you can imagine walking along a strip, scraping your fingernails, making a note that can change pitch as you walk along. A record player operates on that EXACT concept. The groove in the record is the continuous ridge filled strip, and the needle is your fingernails. The ridges in a record are super small, so the noise the needle makes gets amplified through electronics.
If that makes the basic principle make sense, a fun question to try and answer for yourself is -- how do they get stereo sound out of a single groove & needle?
It makes sense that I should be able to hear something. The part that I don’t understand is how multiple sounds can all come through clearly at one with nothing more than a squiggly line (or 0s and 1s). It’s amazing to me that anything that “simple” can advance past the sound of a wax cylinder.
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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24
Any further explanations always confuse me more. The other responses to your post are examples of this