The cassette players and recorders are long gone, and your CD burner probably doesn’t work anymore. And you just can’t risk going down to your favorite record store for another shot of vinyl. All the streaming is fine, but you want something for posterity that will record the music you played during social distancing.
So how about your own vinyl record-maker? Of course, you can go the true audiophile (costly) way, but what about a lightweight, portable and cheap way?
As Design Week reports, sound designer Yuri Suzuki of Pentagram has partnered with the Japanese toy company Gakken to come up with the “Easy Record Maker.” The machine comes pre-packed with ten blank five-inch vinyl discs and you can plug it into any audio source. It can be even your mobile phone.
As Suzuki himself told Design Week, you can then “engrave sound directly from the recording stylus.” The system also has a playback system with a tonearm and a built-in speaker. In its report, BoingBoing actually quotes a price of $81!
Suzuki adds that “I wanted to create a machine that makes it easy and cheap to create your own bespoke record without pressing a whole batch. Vinyl has more value than other media, in my opinion. Recording your voice message or your music onto bespoke vinyl and sending it to someone feels very special and is more valuable (and long-lasting) than just sending a voice message on WhatsApp.
The device should be on the market “soon,” and Suzuki is demoing it on his Instagram profile.
