[NAMM 2016] Cut Your Own Records With Vinyl Recorder

Ever fancied cutting your own vinyl? Well, for a not-unreasonable $4000, you could own a machine that looks like it’s straight out of Back To The Future that does just that, complete with a liquid cooling system and lots of tubes and dials. Kid Koala’s got one and is DJing with tracks he’s cut using it, so it’s no gimmick…

The Vinyl Recorder takes music straight from, say, your MacBook (that’s how they were demoing it here at the NAMM 2016 Media Preview Day), and cuts it directly to a piece of blank vinyl, playing on nothing more that a standard Technics SL1210. The Technics’ tonearm is used for monitoring your recording, and the brass-looking manual dial on the Vinyl Recorder “moves on” the cutting head to give you the visible gaps between the music on your finished vinyl.

Whether or not you’d really want to cut vinyl from digital recordings in 2016 is another question entirely. But the unit has actually been around for 15 years and, unsurprisingly, the company is reporting brisk trade in the past four years as vinyl has resurfaced somewhat. Anyway, we’ve got a video of the whole thing in action for you below.

Do say: Fantastic! I can finally press my own unique sample sets for my all analogue scratch DJ sessions.
Don’t say: Is that a 96kbps YouTube MP3 rip you’re cutting to that pristine piece of vinyl there?

Video talkthrough

• Find out more about the Vinyl Recorder at its suitably old-fashioned website here.

Would you drop £4000 on your own vinyl cutting machine? Who do you think is likely to be in the market for one of these? Has Doc from Back to the Future been told? Let us know your thoughts below…