VinylVideo - Playing video from a 45rpm record

you may have seen my YouTube video demonstrations of VHD and CED the home video formats from the late seventies and early eighties that replayed their video from vinyl discs using a stylus now I mentioned that that sila this idea was nothing new as some of the earliest recordings of television are stored on 10-inch records like this one from 1927 this is one of John Logie Baird's photo vision discs I've got to know more about this subject and the early days of television including mechanical TV I thoroughly recommend paying a visit to the TV door website they've got a fascinating resource of material on this subject but one thing you might not be aware of is that you can in your home today recreate a similar experience to those early photo vision discs with a product called final video and that's what I'm going to be trying out in this video today but first to explain the origins of vinyl video I'll need to take a trip back to 1998 so at this point in history vinyl sales were pretty close to flatlining so it must have seemed like the perfect time for this chap who's an artist from Austria who specializes in the history of electronic media to present his latest project and invention final video to the world he premiered in April 1998 in San Francisco and for the next few years made appearances in various galleries and installations around the world there were presentations live events and a place where you could try out vinyl video for yourself in an interactive exhibit through the use of analog compression each vinyl video held mono audio similar in quality to an AM radio and low definition low framerate black-and-white video and it was just not a normal vinyl record that could be played on any standard record player as long as it was a relatively decent one with a diamond stylus but in between that record player and a television there was a decoder box which took the analog signal that was on the record and converted it into composite or RF video output interestingly as well as being an art exhibit they did sell a small number of the vinyl video kits to the general public and when I say a small number I really mean it they only sold copies of each of the two sets of records they produced and you had to buy the records to be eligible to buy the decoder to play them the original viral video website is still up but you can tell it's vintage from the fact the press packs link to videos that are available in either real video or Google video and also you'll need a fast internet connection because the speeds for the stream could get up to a dizzying 225 kilobits a second so you might want to ask for them on a DV tape instead the last exhibition of vinyl video mentioned on the website was in 2003 in Liverpool but since I only became aware of the existence of the format when I was researching my ced video in 2016 i was about 13 years two legs so i never got the chance to see it in action and that would have been the end of this story if it hadn't been for the super sense analogue concept store a manufacturer based in the heart of vienna this place really does look like a hipsters paradise there's one chap based in there who's developed vinyl video into a slightly more commercial product I mean commercial in the sense it's not just limited to a production of 20 now provided you're happy to pay the money you can get yourself a sleek new vinyl video converter box which also doubles as a Fano preamp 4mm or m/c cartridges and there are also for vinyl video discs you could currently buy to play through it now I was only made aware of the revival of vinyl video thanks to a viewer for the u.s. Randy riddle who'd made a video about they seat bought a set for himself and he contacted me and said that perhaps I should take a look at it too so thanks to him for this and of course I immediately went and ordered a full set there it did take a few weeks for it to arrive from Austria and I'd imagine that these are hand assembled to order I suspect they aren't anticipating to sell more than a few dozen in total after all it's an extremely niche product that's really more of an experimental art project than anything else now it's exceedingly well packaged and you can tell a lot of care and attention has gone into this the manual could be found online you can read it at that link there if you want to now the decoder / preamp comes with a universal power supply outputs 5 volts 2 amps - which of course you fit your appropriate connector for your local power sockets but it is your multi voltage you'll also get an analogue video lead that provides composite output but remember despite these stereo RCA plugs the audio on a vinyl disc is motto to make room for the video of course the preamplifier box has three buttons power calibrate and a total for the line or Fano inputs as well as a dial to control the video gain around the back you've got HDMI out analog AV out lied in follow in line out and power sockets there's also a button on there to select between moving magnet or moving coil cartridges but of course there's also a biding post for the earth or the ground at the top left there to benefit from the full retro experience I'm going to start off by connecting this up to a CR C and I'm going to use my trusty Sony ps9 as the turntable so I'll take the analog AV output from the converter box and just send the video on to the monitor I'm going to send a sound onto some separate powered speakers and then I'm going to plug the monitor into power also plug the power supply into the converter box and finally take the line input on the box and plug that into the line output on my record player right so let's take a look at the records there or should I say vinyl video discs now you can see this isn't a large volume operation by how carefully and neatly everything is wrapped up there was even a hundred and thank you know in the box as well now these are very distinctive looking sleeves deliberately retro look and using very thick cardstock and beautifully printed as well now the only artist I recognized from these is Motorhead apologist to the other groups but my musical tastes lie elsewhere I'm pretty sure they haven't heard of me either but as well as these four releases from super-sense Randy let me know that there is one more vinyl video title available which is included in this box set of LPS it's called cinema but I don't have that one so let's go back to the other ones and open one of them up and take a look a really interesting fold out artwork inside here presumably containing stills from the video as well as an explanation and an introduction to the vinyl video format itself and then finally here's the record there it's a standard 7 inch disc played at 45 rpm but this side is the audiovisual side R then this just contains e single as a standard record now I'd imagine if there's any dust fingerprints or scratches on here it's going to cause more of a problem for the audiovisual side than it would on a standard record so I better blow that bit of dust off there and just clean this record before we try playing it rhyme not really interested in the single side let's go straight to the audiovisual version so I'm going to turn on the preamp and get the record player set into each 7-inch 45 rpm mode you'll see these screeners come on there that's just being generated by the preamp itself of course I'm put the disc in yet so we'll pop the disc in here and we'll press Start and see what happens there there is a calibration process that automatically occurs at the start of each disc but as you can see it just comes straight on and it seems to be working fine [Music] now I just need to play around with the brightness and the contrast a bit just to get this as good as it can possibly be obvious it's never going to be super high-res now this first one's in 4:3 aspect ratio but let's try a couple of the other discs now this one comes on in a 16:9 of course this is a 4:3 screen I'm showing [Music] and the same goes for this disc as well now I've got to be careful playing too much of the audio from these so it doesn't hit an auto concert match but you get the idea what the video quality is like and the audio well it pretty much sounds like it's being played down a telephone by pressing a combination of buttons on the decoder you can access the setup menus which let you select the output video standard between ntsc je pal and ntsc and then for the analog video output you can adjust the TV aspect ratio as well as align the image and adjust the chroma now let's move away from the CRT and try through the HDMI out bonus standard modernish widescreen television and we'll play one of those widescreen discs on it as well [Music] now I know this is extremely low quality but it's still amazing to me that these videos are being played back by a standard record player stylist and the one of these discs can hold a full music video let's just take a quick look at some video capture [Music] [Music] [Applause] funnily enough there's some people out there watching this YouTube video in 4k and they're kind of wondering why they bothered there but let's just take a closer look at one of these discs because if I get the light just right on it you can see that the recording on the audiovisual side just doesn't look like a standard audio record it's got some unusual herringbone type patterns in there that just reflect the light in an unusual way if we flip the disc over and have a look at the standard music only side you can see the difference it doesn't have those patterns on there in this article about the original 1990s version of the vinyl disc it mentions back then they got the frame rate up to 8 frames a second now I'm not sure but it feels to me like they might have slightly improved upon that for the current version of it if you want to read more about the technical side of it have a look at the second paragraph here while I try and put you off by playing a brief snippet of the audio that I've captured from the audiovisual side of the disc [Music] now there are some people out there that would like to examine that audio in a bit more detail so I've imported some of it into audacity you can see the needle drop on the left there and their welds the calibration section and then into the video and audio which is sent on the left and right channels as a series of pulses if I just take that initial section off and zoom in here you can look at it in a bit more detail the sound of this reminds me a little bit of the sound that came out to the back of my high vision muse laserdisc player which then went off to be decoded into video and audio with the high vision muse laserdisc decoder so hopefully to those people that were intrigued about this what they're seeing on screen now is telling them something about the way the audio and video are encoded but to me it means absolutely nothing okay let's just take a look inside the box now see what's going on in here now it's held together with six very tight screws in their base as well as two security-type screws in that salt but once all those are removed the inside slide out easily now that outer casing on there really is quite a thick heavy piece of bent steel it really does make the whole thing feel quite substantial there's much less circuitry in here than I was expecting and it's very neatly laid out you'll notice a familiar logo at the top right there yes it's using a Raspberry Pi a model A plus to be precise to do the video decoding and output it makes sense in a low volume operation use something that's ready-made rather than getting a custom-made board done that you probably had to buy in batches of a thousand from China you can see how it's attached via USB to the Fano preamp and hair the HDMI out an AV output line up with the back panel now there's very little else I can tell you about this other than I'd imagined that Fano preamp board is custom made after all how many preamps have a USB hanging off this side and you can see how it all lines up neatly with the backplate and the various wires and connectors going off to that front panel where the potentiometer is in the middle for the video game control and suppose there's a few people that would like to know what was on that micro SD card that's in that Raspberry Pi so I'll just took a couple of screenshots of that you bear to pause these and just have a look at this in a little bit more detail so that's what's on the card and then if I just look first off at that readme that's what that says and then if you also once have a look at the build instructions that's on screen now I think you'd plug there to read that if you were looking at this in 4k but that's all I've got for that so we'll just put it back together now there's just one last thing I need to test I haven't tried the preamp section on the vinyl video box I've just used it with the line input so far so I swapped out my existing pre outlets in my high five with the vinyl video one moved into it's moving coil position because that's the kind of cartridge I've got on my turntable and it sounded pretty much the same as the other one I couldn't really tell any difference at all between them of course if you are just going to use it as a preamp it's quite an expensive one and of course despite the fact that this record player is better audio reproduction than the other one when it comes to vinyl video that doesn't really make any difference the video quality is much the same one thing you can do to make it look better is stand further away from the screen and I'm not being negative there it's just the fact that with a smaller image you don't tend to notice those horizontal lines as much I just wish there were a few more titles available on this format though so there you go that was vinyl video definitely one of the most unusual current day products are covered for a while but in a world where it feels like every new piece of technology is just and ever so slightly upgraded and more expensive version of last year's device it's refreshing to see something unusual or even crazy every once in a while yes this isn't a mass-market product but it's those tech tinkerers the outliers the oddballs who are the ones that keep things interesting for me and who sparked my imagination this is a channel that celebrates the unusual and I'm more than happy to leave things like smartphone reviews for everyone else to cover if you want to learn more about vinyl video there are links of plenty in the video description text box and if you're feeling generous you can always support me on patreon but that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 464,015

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, VinylVideo, Vinyl Video, Vinyl, Video, videos on vinyl, Baird, Phonovision, record, 45rpm, play, experimental, art, demonstration, Supersense, analog, media, gadget, pre-amplifier, pre-amp, turntable, converter

Id: UtNGVb94TFE

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SuviSaaRistonMunaa]

Oh wow, thats kind of crazy, but still r/oddlysatisfying and cool!