Vinyl is dead; long live vinyl!

Easy Record Maker. © Yuri Suzuki.

While audio cassette recorders and CD burners are going extinct, reports of the death of microgroove disks are greatly exaggerated. In fact, LPs cling so hard to life that Yuri Suzuki, a London-based designer, has created the Easy Record Maker, a small record-player-like device that makes it easy and cheap to cut your own vinyl. By connecting a phone or other digital device through an auxiliary cable to the recorder, you can engrave a 5-inch record in 45 or 33 RPM format in just four minutes. Then, simply swap out the cutting arm for the tone arm to play your record (assuming you don’t have a record player). The Easy Record Maker is currently available from Gakken in Japan for JPY2,778 tax in, or CAD113. It comes with 10 blank disks and two needles. It will come to US markets in a few months. It does, however, have one limitation: it only supports mono engraving.

⇨ Colossal, Grace Ebert, “Cut your own vinyl with this DIY record engraver and player designed by Yuri Suzuki.”