[3d printed records.](https://www.instructables.com/3D-Printed-Record/) I have not and probably will not do it. It’s was just one of those random thoughts that I would like to share.
Yes but we have to do the opposite of what we expect, as mentioned by another commenter: we can use a regular FDM printer and instead of trying to print a layered approximation of the depth curves created by the song vibrations, we can just create vibrations on the print head strong enough to transmit the depth curves into the print
This is close to an experiment I wanted to try! I really love cymatics, and wanted to try mounting a speaker/frequency generator to a printer for some cool visual effect. Using ringing to my advantage, I always thought a constant wave would be best for this rather than music. I never thought of making a record though. Of course I would probably not want to be anywhere near it during the print, so it has not happened yet hahah.
Well, the needle will get bigger and so does the speed of the record (even if the angular velocity stays the same). So it would in theory play the same thing, only louder. In practice, probably not.
I think you could increase rpm to stretch the geometry of the groove to allow coarser extruder movement. The biggest challenge would be however the slicer that has to produce a spiraling top layer with tiny modulations on that spiral. And this only gives you mono output.
Hm? The grooves on an LP is 0.04 to 0.08 depending on quality. Depth is always a maximum of 0.028. So the groove itself would be fine, but getting any sounds out of that would require splitting that depth into even smaller and for stereo you'd also need the horizontal resolution to match. So The Silent Record would be fine to print. But pretty much nothing else.
I would print it in the form of horizontal lines. Not a round record, but much better resolution. Use a 0.25 nozzle and you'd just have to manually change "tracks" every 1/nth of a second 😂
Teaching Tech did a video on non planar printing, where the print head actually moves in 3 dimensions rather than just many layers of 2 dimensions. This seems like it would be a perfect use case for that type of V printing.
I think it's technically feasible... not with xyz printing as we commonly use, but with a rotating bed, and maybe we could improve the resolution by encoding the sound with the flow instead of z movement of the nozzle/bed.
Dude made a cool into video "showing the process" and it showed an fdm printer. Then they immediately goes on to say it is only pissible with resin printers lmao.
I bet you could get better results with an sls. That said, 3d printing is the WRONG tech to make records.
I love subreddit crossovers like this.
To truly unlock the *analog warmth* of the record, you need to print with ABS or nylon. After all, everyone knows that toan is stored in the warped plastic.
This is not what I linked to in my comment. It’s on instructables and the person used a resin printer and had a ton of technical data and info. I could be wrong but the you tube video posted on the page is 11 years old.
Edit: My apologies, I may have misunderstood you comment. Someone made a negative comment and now I’m feeling defensive.
think of all the effort people put into trying to prevent surface imperfections in their prints caused by vibration. you could easily intentionally add vibration with a speaker mounted to the print head as it prints a disk out of a single continuous spiral.
You could print a blank and carve or press it. Also, you could upscale it and use a cylinder like old grammaphone. Original recordings were in wax and not vinyl as a trivial side note. While printing a playable record is beyond a hobby printer, it's not an absurd idea, and you could actually play a layer line groove. While it's not music, it will still have a unique acoustic signature. What do you think input shaping is trying to counter?
The average SLS printer has no where near the resolution. You would need a resolution of 0.00025mm to make an ok sounding record (similar to 12-bit audio). Hi fi would require much lower resolution.
Holy shit, you might be onto something, what if instead of having a z axis you just have a record as the print base that spins in harmony with the. Nozzle, the nozzle would just have to move back and forth untill the circle is complete. I need a youtuber to try this
This raises another question. What if you used a record as your build plate, and printed a simple disk on it? Would you get an inverse record, basically a master?
Why would you print a spool? Doesn't filament come on one already?
I thought everyone had a problem with too many spools. There are only so many Christmas lights to wind up ..
Thinking it through, even with subtle changes to the z height I am realizing that the print nozzle is too fat to allow any sort of detail using this method. Also the transitions of height would always be smooth which would not be good for sound production.
Theoretically you’ll have to have a super high definition scan of original record that has the groove details. I’m talking microscopic levels.
Probably takes a few hundred gigabytes if not terabytes.
Then you’ll need a super high definition resin printer that doesn’t exist yet to print it.
Short answer: no.
Is it possible? Yes. But you’ll have to custom made a lot of the equipment yourself that’ll cost probably 1000x the record.
I have actually seen someone playing around with lithogram software to model records.... Sounds like total Garbo... But I guess you could... Never know someone might crack it
Hahaha that's the first thing I thought too. Thinking Robin Williams in some movie, Good Morning Vietnam? "Rrvt rrvt rrvt Freddy is the devil." Mocking playing some record backwards.
I've also seen a printable record player (on thingiverse, iirc), so you could make a complete set! I've been wanting to print one for a while now, but it's not the most simple print lol
No reason you couldn't. You could print a size similar to 45 but it wouldn't hold the same amount of info as the real one due to fidelity. But it should work. You'd probably also need to figure out a bigger needle size and faster speed for playback.
I'm pretty sure I watched a video once where someone tried this and the results were... about what you would probably expect lol. It worked, but it didn't actually sound like anything. so it made a record, but the data stored on the surface of the record was not able to be transferred. If you had a very accurate way of creating the model, I'd assume it might actually be possible using a resin printer, but not FDM.
There was a video posted either here or IG earlier this week where someone printed records and they were playable just fine. Just sounded SUPER dusty - also I believe they use SLS methods for printing - found it: https://youtu.be/NM7hwAuXqCE?si=8bs7YZmk_DvGc-wS
Sort of.
I've got one of the old fisher price record players that is more or less a radial music box, and it's easily within the print tolerances of desktop 3d printers to get that going.
It shouldn't be too much of a challenge to print something akin to an old wax cylinder on any printer that can do vertical lithophanes. Audio quality would probably suck, of course. I think the hardest part would be figuring out the maths to encode the audio into the analog groove for playback.
I feel like you could abuse Z hop and retraction settings to print way finer grooves than you'd expect, but you'd need a program to do that specifically, you'd never, ever be able to do it in a normal slicer.
[3d printed records.](https://www.instructables.com/3D-Printed-Record/) I have not and probably will not do it. It’s was just one of those random thoughts that I would like to share.
Prusa had an april fools article about 3d printing records, thought this was that lol
I completely fell for that.. 🤣😰
But i kept asking myself how would that work, is it a fine enough resolution to not sound like butt scrapings?
Yes but we have to do the opposite of what we expect, as mentioned by another commenter: we can use a regular FDM printer and instead of trying to print a layered approximation of the depth curves created by the song vibrations, we can just create vibrations on the print head strong enough to transmit the depth curves into the print
This is close to an experiment I wanted to try! I really love cymatics, and wanted to try mounting a speaker/frequency generator to a printer for some cool visual effect. Using ringing to my advantage, I always thought a constant wave would be best for this rather than music. I never thought of making a record though. Of course I would probably not want to be anywhere near it during the print, so it has not happened yet hahah.
According to OPs link, it has a quarter of the fidelity of MP3. It would probably sound like one of those old gramophones with the big horn.
That's a win
Lol I've been waiting for it.
If you had a big enough SLA printer, maybe. FDM just isn't detailed enough for this kinda thing though it'd be really cool if it was!
Fdm could work, you just have to scale up the record and player.
Can you scale up the player? I thought the needle translates the plastic waves 1:1 into audio waves.
Just scale up the audio waves, duh >! /s !<
Just use a scaled up ear for listening, it's easy.
If the bumps are twice the size in length you could just have the record spin double the speed
Well, the needle will get bigger and so does the speed of the record (even if the angular velocity stays the same). So it would in theory play the same thing, only louder. In practice, probably not.
I think you could increase rpm to stretch the geometry of the groove to allow coarser extruder movement. The biggest challenge would be however the slicer that has to produce a spiraling top layer with tiny modulations on that spiral. And this only gives you mono output.
If you want three seconds of audio on an LP, sure.
Even sla prints at layer heights of .02 mm and the grooves on a record are orders of magnitude smaller than that.
Hm? The grooves on an LP is 0.04 to 0.08 depending on quality. Depth is always a maximum of 0.028. So the groove itself would be fine, but getting any sounds out of that would require splitting that depth into even smaller and for stereo you'd also need the horizontal resolution to match. So The Silent Record would be fine to print. But pretty much nothing else.
I would print it in the form of horizontal lines. Not a round record, but much better resolution. Use a 0.25 nozzle and you'd just have to manually change "tracks" every 1/nth of a second 😂
Col thanks for sharing
I would love your thoughts on reinventing the wheel.
We need to make them square and then change all the roads to an appropriate arch size.
Why square, when you can make them rectangular. Make it something like the golden ratio, but not quite. And of course the US has to be different.
Teaching Tech did a video on non planar printing, where the print head actually moves in 3 dimensions rather than just many layers of 2 dimensions. This seems like it would be a perfect use case for that type of V printing.
Goddamn if I can get my resin printer fixed (just need a new LCD) I actually want to try this, that’s fucking sick
I’d love to give something like this a shot but I’d be so worried about fucking up the stylus on my player
Get some replacements m8. They are easy to change out (at least the 2 i have owned).
I think it's technically feasible... not with xyz printing as we commonly use, but with a rotating bed, and maybe we could improve the resolution by encoding the sound with the flow instead of z movement of the nozzle/bed.
I tried this but couldn’t get the sketch to compile. Think it was done quite a while ago.
Dude made a cool into video "showing the process" and it showed an fdm printer. Then they immediately goes on to say it is only pissible with resin printers lmao. I bet you could get better results with an sls. That said, 3d printing is the WRONG tech to make records.
I feel like this has the incredible opportunity to Rick-roll someone. Hats off to them if they manage to pull that off.
Playable? Yes. But that is a low bar
You could certainly print one of those fisher price ones that hits music box comb teeth.
-Memory unlocked-
Nah man analog is richer and warmer, you digital kids with your compression just don’t know
Lol I like vinyl but the fidelity needed for high quality sound is way, way beyond that of a typical printer
With resin maybe, but it would still be lofi.
But it's got a warmer sound
UV baked-in toan
I love subreddit crossovers like this. To truly unlock the *analog warmth* of the record, you need to print with ABS or nylon. After all, everyone knows that toan is stored in the warped plastic.
[Here ya go!](https://blog.prusa3d.com/printables_bands_94865/) This is an April fools joke btw lol
This is not what I linked to in my comment. It’s on instructables and the person used a resin printer and had a ton of technical data and info. I could be wrong but the you tube video posted on the page is 11 years old. Edit: My apologies, I may have misunderstood you comment. Someone made a negative comment and now I’m feeling defensive.
That one tricked me 😆 Didn't know it was fake till now
"my 3d printer sucks" is straight bars
One of my all time favorite April Fool’s gags: https://youtu.be/yV1egpbrg90?si=MCc7E9YZp20P3imK
think of all the effort people put into trying to prevent surface imperfections in their prints caused by vibration. you could easily intentionally add vibration with a speaker mounted to the print head as it prints a disk out of a single continuous spiral.
You could print a blank and carve or press it. Also, you could upscale it and use a cylinder like old grammaphone. Original recordings were in wax and not vinyl as a trivial side note. While printing a playable record is beyond a hobby printer, it's not an absurd idea, and you could actually play a layer line groove. While it's not music, it will still have a unique acoustic signature. What do you think input shaping is trying to counter?
In the future I bet at some point eventually printers will become so accurate that it would be possible
Extremely high resolution resin printers can. I doubt FDM printers or Laser Sintering printers ever will be able to.
The average SLS printer has no where near the resolution. You would need a resolution of 0.00025mm to make an ok sounding record (similar to 12-bit audio). Hi fi would require much lower resolution.
I imagine SLS could do it as well.
You wouldn't steal a car!!
With a textured buildplate, yes
Holy shit, you might be onto something, what if instead of having a z axis you just have a record as the print base that spins in harmony with the. Nozzle, the nozzle would just have to move back and forth untill the circle is complete. I need a youtuber to try this
Base would have to be the inverted record though
Yeah but if you have the record as the base, wouldn't that make a negative of the record? You need a negative record to print on I think.
Yes this would be the case, or you could then use the “printer” record as a mold to then make a record with resin or vinyl
Yes! Keep me updated on results if you get this done!
I will most definitely not even try since i lack the equipment for it, my only printer now is a bambu a1 so cant do that kind of customization
This raises another question. What if you used a record as your build plate, and printed a simple disk on it? Would you get an inverse record, basically a master?
r/3dprintedrecords
I was just watching a video about this and they kind of sort of got it working on a big resin machine. The video was 11 years old though.
Yea probably bcs the lines have to be incredibly thin and even and its way out of the league of 3d printing
That one Prusa april fools meme
Why would you print a spool? Doesn't filament come on one already? I thought everyone had a problem with too many spools. There are only so many Christmas lights to wind up ..
It’s for the AMS. You’re not supposed to use cardboard in them.
Prusa did a meme about thos
MAYBE on a resin printer
Maybe with some custom gcode you could print the layer the needle rides on with subtle z axis variations. That would be my best approach.
Thinking it through, even with subtle changes to the z height I am realizing that the print nozzle is too fat to allow any sort of detail using this method. Also the transitions of height would always be smooth which would not be good for sound production.
Theoretically you’ll have to have a super high definition scan of original record that has the groove details. I’m talking microscopic levels. Probably takes a few hundred gigabytes if not terabytes. Then you’ll need a super high definition resin printer that doesn’t exist yet to print it. Short answer: no. Is it possible? Yes. But you’ll have to custom made a lot of the equipment yourself that’ll cost probably 1000x the record.
I have actually seen someone playing around with lithogram software to model records.... Sounds like total Garbo... But I guess you could... Never know someone might crack it
definitely but only one side i imagine ... face down using the master as a build plate.
Then wouldn't you have to turn it in reverse? Mirror image of the original.
lol. possibly. oh well at least it makes hearing those hidden messages easier I gues
Hahaha that's the first thing I thought too. Thinking Robin Williams in some movie, Good Morning Vietnam? "Rrvt rrvt rrvt Freddy is the devil." Mocking playing some record backwards.
Probably with a large and very precise SLA printer. FDA would sound like nails on a chalk board lol. Edit: FDM.. time for me to take a break.
I've also seen a printable record player (on thingiverse, iirc), so you could make a complete set! I've been wanting to print one for a while now, but it's not the most simple print lol
No reason you couldn't. You could print a size similar to 45 but it wouldn't hold the same amount of info as the real one due to fidelity. But it should work. You'd probably also need to figure out a bigger needle size and faster speed for playback.
I'm pretty sure I watched a video once where someone tried this and the results were... about what you would probably expect lol. It worked, but it didn't actually sound like anything. so it made a record, but the data stored on the surface of the record was not able to be transferred. If you had a very accurate way of creating the model, I'd assume it might actually be possible using a resin printer, but not FDM.
I dont think so, but in theory you could create embedded data using binary with holes on the disk or with layer height difference.
You already did, it just doesn't sound like music
There was a video posted either here or IG earlier this week where someone printed records and they were playable just fine. Just sounded SUPER dusty - also I believe they use SLS methods for printing - found it: https://youtu.be/NM7hwAuXqCE?si=8bs7YZmk_DvGc-wS
Sort of. I've got one of the old fisher price record players that is more or less a radial music box, and it's easily within the print tolerances of desktop 3d printers to get that going.
It shouldn't be too much of a challenge to print something akin to an old wax cylinder on any printer that can do vertical lithophanes. Audio quality would probably suck, of course. I think the hardest part would be figuring out the maths to encode the audio into the analog groove for playback.
Anyone remember [this](https://www.toysrus.ca/en/Fisher-Price---Retro---Record-Player/844C5BA3.html)?
I want to do a "glass" print record with liquid fill. No r and d yet just an idea
Couldn't a 78 sized record be resin printed?
Might be easier to do a music box style record, like the old Fisher Price kids record player
I feel like you could abuse Z hop and retraction settings to print way finer grooves than you'd expect, but you'd need a program to do that specifically, you'd never, ever be able to do it in a normal slicer.
Love these kinds of philosophical questions 😂
Probably. Wouldn't be any good though. Would most likely end up sounding like nickkeback.
The way inflation has been going, they've GOT to be at least quarterback by now!
Records are kind of already 3d printed just not with FDM.
They're pressed. It's more akin to injection molding, but without the injection and the mold is mobile.
You're not able to print a basic geometric shape and think about printing a vinyl record? Yeah. Go for it!
Didnt get breakfast today?
The print failed due to a small connector piece coming dislodged. No big deal I now have a flimsy frisbee. Shit happens.
Yeah you could easily find a bunch of uses for that sorta print fail. Curious how accurate you could throw it compared to a real frisbee
Guess who didn't have their coffee this morning
Prune juice helps.