The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I know that basic disc records can be made on CDs with decent quality using a record cutter. They are short, though. It would be an easy thing to simply use a laserdisc, since they are so much bigger, right? Has this ever been done?

I saw someone doing that this past summer. They had a booth in a park and were advertising "make your own records" - so I went up to ask what they were cutting on to, and they showed me old 12" laserdiscs. I didn't get a record made, though.

Wolfe wrote:I saw someone doing that this past summer. They had a booth in a park and were advertising "make your own records" - so I went up to ask what they were cutting on to, and they showed me old 12" laserdiscs. I didn't get a record made, though.

And of course, 50 years from now laserdisc collectors will cringe reading this. I am pretty sure they are even nowadays a lot rarer than even 100 year old 78s. How could these people have been so thoughtless and destroy these valuable pieces of history...

Andreas

On the up side, fifty years from now, records that are a hundred years old now will still be playable -- but the information on laser discs will probably have degraded enough to be unplayable by then. It's a weird digital world we live in, now.

Laserdiscs are still pretty common, I think. They're all over ebay, and pretty cheap, too.

Yeah, laserdiscs ought to be put to some use now, because it appears that most will develop "digital rot." I see them in the thrift stores while I'm looking for records. Saw a few crates of of a collection of them in one place selling for a buck apiece or something. Many still had the shrink wrap on them with the original price stickers. Someone had paid 30-40-50 dollars apiece for these things, thousands of dollars in total and now they're basically trash.

I did not want to suggest that laserdiscs will actually survive that long. I just thought that's exactly what someone in the 30s felt when they trashed a Berliner record or a VV-XX. Consumer goods during their time period are just that, consumer goods. Once outdated they don't have value. Those that survive may become valuable again, but usually during the same generation.

Andreas

I got a VHS tape player from my parents. I'd better preserve it. Maybe my grandchildren will get rich from my cautious actions

I honestly would oppose to use Laserdiscs for that purpose. You can get polycarbonate sheets such as Makrolon for a very affordable price and drill a correct hole into into it.

In one of Norman Field's marvelous videos, he is demonstrating that:

[youtubehq]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7nKa_aHyR8[/youtubehq]

When the Soviets had banned certain Western music (like rock n' roll) pirates used to distribute it clandestinely via "homemade" X-Ray / polycarbonate sheets. Dubbed from whatever they used, probably other records.