If you’ve ever wondered how a black disk of vinyl could make such sweet music, look no further.
The good people behind the Applied Science YouTube channel just uploaded a video showing exactly what happens when a needle moves through the grooves in a record.
To do it, they cut small sections out of a vinyl LP (Wendy Carlos & Benjamin Folkman’s Switched-On Bach, to be precise) and attached them to an electron microscope amd modified the stylus to fit in the microscope’s chamber. The result is a 60-frame stop-motion animation giving us the closest ever look at how a needle moves across the record.
They also provide an interesting explanation of how each component part of a record player works, and how the process changed when CDs were introduced.
