Microscopic Image Of A Vinyl Record

The appearance of the grooves.

Microscopic image of a vinyl record.

The white fibers and specks in the photos are the sources audio problems. Old forms of stylus. Click any label for an enlarged image. I describe how i made a stop motion animation of a phonograph needle in an lp groove using an electron microscope.

Microscope world recently took an old vinyl record and put it under a metallurgical microscope to see what the grooves looked like at high magnification. Posted by jason kottke nov 06 2014. But i d already copied them to my computer using what else dak s incomparable lp to mp3 system. Scroll down to see examples.

This video shows how the stylus moves through the grooves. Microscopic images shared this image on their twitter some months back showing what a record s groove looks like under 1000x magnification. The microscope views show the surface conditions the stylus encounters as it tracks in the record groove. A 6 3 megapixel microscope digital camera was used to capture the images.

This first vinyl record image was captured at 100x magnification using reflected light through the objective lens. Unfortunately records were both hurt and injured during the making of these microscopic pictures. When you look really closely at record grooves like at 1000x magnification you can see the waveforms of the music itself. Stylus tracking and test records.

The following are microscope photos of vinyl lp record surfaces and grooves that illustrate source of poor sounding album. Here s one of my dirty records. Record wear and the elliptical stylus.