Social media users are mind-blown over the ‘trippy’ way a vinyl works to play music.
To all those of you who bought a record player and some vinyls just to look aesthetic and cool but don’t have a clue how they actually work and pump out music… this one’s for you.
Musician Josef Cookz took to Twitter on over the weekend to reveal what he learnt while studying his degree about how a record player needle reading grooves on a vinyl ‘translates into sound’.
You’ve been warned: “It’s the coolest thing ever when you finally understand it.”
First things first, what are the grooves in the vinyl all about?
Well, if you think about how you see sound when the vibration or waves are represented visually – a squiggly line which is shaped by the pitch, tone, amplitude and frequency of the sound – vinyl grooves are essentially these squiggly lines but on a physical surface.
But how do they get there?
Getting a song onto a vinyl
YAMAHA explains a diamond needle is used to cut ‘a continuous spiral groove into an aluminum disc covered in lacquer’.
“This groove, which runs from the outside of the disc to the inside, is an analog representation of the sound waves,” it reveals.
While the grooves in a vinyl may look pretty uniform, the groove is ‘actually V-shaped’ and each wall of the groove ‘carries one of the stereo signals’.
“The right channel is carried by the side closest to the outside of the record, and the left is carried by the inside wall. The frequency and amplitude (volume) information are a reflection of the groove’s width and depth. If there’s too much bass, a needle could literally jump out of the groove!
“It’s the job of the mastering engineer to get it just right when doing the transfer to vinyl.”
How the player reads the vinyl and produces music
Record players are ‘electromagnetic devices that convert vibrations encoded in the grooves of the vinyl into electrical signals’.
When a record is played on the turntable (player) – a circular plate – the plate then rotates and spins the record ‘at a set speed of 33 1/3, 45 or 78 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute)’.
A needle – called the stylus – is attached to a cartridge which sits on the end of an arm on top of the record player.
As the record spins, the stylus runs through the grooves on the vinyl, vibrating and creating sound waves and the arm continues to ‘follow the grooves and spirals inwards’.
The sound waves then travel through the player and the vibrations are converted into electrical signals which then come out the speakers.
As one Twitter user said: “Trippy.” And another resolved: “Learning the mechanics behind sound made it feel like magic.”
