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Main Highlights:
- The PO-80 Record Factory from Teenage Engineering will engrave music into blank vinyl records.
- These mono recordings may be played in the same way as any other record.
- Musicians have the ability to record, scratch, and re-record their own songs.
Forget about home recording or music streaming. You may now make your own vinyl records at home.
Teenage Engineering is known for its whimsically designed audio synthesizers that can be used to create music digitally, but it has now created a means for you to preserve your melodies in the most analog way possible: on vinyl. The new PO-80 Record Factory from the Swedish business is a turntable that allows you to cut your own lo-fi vinyl records and play them back.
The PO-80 can only cut 5-inch records and has a recording time of four or three minutes per side at 33 and 45 rpm, respectively. You can also play bigger records with the accompanying 7-inch record adaptor, but you can’t cut them.
Teenage Engineering (TE) designed the PO-80, like its calculator-inspired Pocket Operator range of synthesizers that allow you to create your own sounds, to be portable. The aim is to plug a TE PO-14 or similar into the record factory to produce vinyl editions of your music, but other audio sources might be plugged into the input jack. There’s also a line-out port for listening and another for charging through USB.
The Record Factory sports a bright orange and white plastic body with retro tech-toy looks, as well as separate cutting and playback arms. It was created in collaboration with Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki, who creates unique items such as this circuit board radio shaped like the London Underground system.
Suzuki was also in charge of a comparable record maker created in partnership with the Japanese publisher Gakken. The PO-80 comes with a copy of Gakken magazine in the box.
Swedish masters of musical instrument design Teenage Engineering sells a record player that can cut as well as play vinyl. Depending on your perspective, the $150 PO-80 Record Factory is either a fun novelty and ideal Christmas gift, or a truly great tool for artists. In any case, it provides us an occasion to investigate the strange world of vinyl recordings.
“With the recent debut of TE’s new PO-80 home vinyl cutter, people are questioning if records manufactured at home can sound as excellent as those made commercially.”
Gideon Waxman, musician and founder of the Strong Sounds website, told Lifewire via email, “The answer is yes—and no.” “On the one hand, the PO-80 provides a high-quality cutting system comparable to commercial presses. However, there are certain major variations that cause home-pressed albums to sound different.”
Self Scratching
The PO-80 is a collaboration between Yuri Suzuki, a Japanese artist, designer, and musician, and a rebranding of Suzuki’s own Record Maker developed for Japanese company Gakken.
The PO-80 is equipped with both a cutting and a playback arm. To record, connect an audio source by aux cable or USB and play it into the device while it is recording.
It’s similar to manufacturing a tape, only you only get one shot. Fortunately, the blank vinyl discs cost $20 for ten, or $2 each. Recordings may also be done in mono and at either 45 or 33 rpm (revolutions per minute), with three or four minutes of recording time.
But who would pay for this? As previously stated, it may make a fun novelty present, but the major market for this may be artists who are always looking for new ways to mess with their sound. For example, if you like to scratch records wik-a-wik-a-wik-a-wik-a-wik-style, now you can scratch your own sounds.
“[It] has previously been very difficult to scratch your own samples without either A: paying a company to create a custom record, which is rather expensive, or B: purchasing $2k worth of DJ gear and utilizing Serato (a sampling app). This little TE gadget allows you to record your own samples and then scratch on them afterward “Burly-Johanssen-24, a musician, stated in a Reddit thread.
It’s also cool to be able to sell vinyl versions of your own songs. You might, for example, offer limited versions during concerts.
Master Record
But wait a minute. You probably don’t want to record your Ableton Live project directly into the PO-80.
Music must be properly prepared or mastered in order to sound nice on vinyl. You may accomplish this by hand, or you can use Teenage Engineering’s online Mastering Machine tool.
“Mastering for vinyl, digital, and CDs is a distinct procedure. If you submit a lousy master to a digital service provider (DSP) like Spotify, the worst that may happen is that the song sounds horrible and your friends mock your poor musical taste “Elliott Bank, a music producer, said Lifewire via email. “If a defective master is pressed to vinyl, if the bass is too loud or the grooves are too deep, the needle can practically fly off the record, resulting in a faulty batch of records.”
Teenage Engineering
When the direct-to-disc recording was the standard, artists had to not only get everything correct in one take but also self-master their sound. It, like most music technology, altered how artists played.
“Even Billie Holiday, you know, with her whiney vocals? Many of the reasons she had this very limited voice tone, which is now famous, was that she needed to avoid making the needle hop when recording “Charlie Harding, composer and Switched on Pop podcast presenter, stated on the VergeCast podcast.
“If there were too many changes in the voice, the needle may skip and damage the recording, therefore part of the vocal style is really governed by Billie Holiday’s era’s technological constraints.”
The PO-80 may be a novelty, but it has already been shown to be a legitimate musical tool. And it’s easy to see why Teenage Engineering has already sold out of the initial batch when it looks this fantastic and is so competitively priced.
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