Cut Your Own Record at Home. And I Mean REALLY Cut a Record.

From Hack a Day:

Vinyl records are an amazingly simple technology, but surprisingly we haven’t seen many builds to capitalize on the ease of recording music onto a vinyl disk. [Seringson] made his own vinyl polycarbonate cutter to record his own records at home. The impressive thing is he did this with parts just lying around.

Just like the professional and obsolete record cutters of yore, [Seringson]‘s build uses two speaker drivers mounted at a 45° angle to reproduce a stereo audio track. Each of these drivers reproduce the left and right audio track by carving them into the polycarbonate of a CD with an extremely sharp needle. From the video, the audio quality of [Seringson]‘s record cutter is pretty good – more than enough to recreate the sound of a 1940′s 78 RPM record, but not quite up to the task of reproducing something produced and mastered recently.