Shady scams and other silly business ideas to take advantage of earnest new vinyl collectors

And I remember something similar from the 70s or 80s that had a soft vinyl needle to track the groove but actually read the groove optically. Very expensive then, needless to say.

From design to functionalities, we've created a record player that fits modern-day life while keeping the crackle & pops.

It's not a flaw, it's a feature!

Religious silence. LOL.

The perfect $699 accessory for playing the $3 Roger Miller record you picked up at Goodwill.

(Not the price, I just made that up)

if at some point we poll these scams LOVE will have good odds

So this is essentially a digital Vinyl Killer Van

Here's another one. A stupid little wooden block that careers around the record like a toy truck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tfhs-pujQk

Would rather have this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwZE6hWsPMg

(Probably was way cheaper, too)

It took a few minutes of reading for me to be convinced it actually read the groove, versus scanning the label and playing the LP from spotify or something.

― nickn, Wednesday, January 25, 2017 6:14 AM (six hours ago)

Yeah, honestly, if I'm not able to have an actual record player then I'm fine just playing off itunes, I really don't see the point of these shitty shitty things.

It hurts me to see them and imagine the damage that they are doing

I would love to find roger miler lps at goodwill here on the west coast...thrift stores should have an lp exchange program bc I bet the vinyl section in the average thrift store in Oklahoma has a ton of the old country records I've been looking for for ages...meanwhile I'm sure some okie is desperate for nana mouskori and can't find her in a sea of jim reeves and glen campbell

love the 'this is what it is, this is all it does' line in that rokblok video. accurate summation of what a useless object it is

someone was making new vinyl killer vans in the early 2000s and I was sad I never bought one

A few months ago I kept getting ads for this "floating record vertical turntable" from Gramovox.

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0640/2259/t/4/assets/frlm_top_walnut.jpg?15130332091970932474

Was a Kickstarter but now available for $550.

https://www.gramovox.com/products/floating-record

xp I remember seeing one on that Grand Royal magazine poster with all the turntables on it, maybe late 90's?

these van things are horrifying

I skim-read the Love thing to where it said "LOVE then scans the vinyl to determine its size and number of tracks" and was suspicious of how it worked (missed that it has a traditional stylus although apparently a magical one which never wears down "LOVE will never damage the record")

thought to self: if you guessed that any silences were track endings and queried freedb with the resulting track times would the CD metadata come back so the gadget could look it up on a streaming service? I'm guessing the between-track silences are too different btwn CD and vinyl but hmm

PS "LOVE reads your vinyl with a standard size stylus in order to transmit melodies specific to analog sound" argh so itchy now

oh god i missed THAT, barrrrrrrrf

I imagined it just spinning REALLY FAST and assuming any silences or gaps were track markers

also your record catches fire

That IS religious!

Most people don't realize how many melodies were lost in the transition to digital.

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/cominsoon-tech/campaign-bg/LOVE_Turntable_revolutionary_smartphone_controlled_turntable_crowdfunding_Agency2.0_features-compressor.jpg

pretty sure Basho here is listening to a $1 copy of the soundtrack to "She's Having A Baby"

it looks like a carry case for really large sunglasses

I suddenly want to go buy a variety of fancy sweaters

then scans the vinyl to determine its size and number of tracks" and was suspicious of how it worked

yeah unless the camera is so accurate it can zoom into and differentiate one groove from another it sounds like 100% bs

I was pretty impressed when I saw this video of a record player from 1983 that could identify tracks, skip between them, play both sides of the record without needing to turn it over etc... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgAUxJmh5uE

At no point in that video could I tell what kind of sweater that guy was wearing.

I always coveted one of those ELP laser turntables that could play records without a stylus, but because they were never mass-produced the price of a single unit is insane. $15,000!

yeah the idea of laser scanning a vinyl disc holds a lot of intrigue for me

I was talking to somebody at a party a year ago who claimed to be in collaboration with some academic working precisely on laser-imaging vinyl for archival purposes, I think specifically with an eye towards unique records already in bad shape where you don't want to risk playing them. I got interested 'cause one of the applications he was working on was the whole WWII-era "record a message to send home to the folks - brought to you by the Coca-Cola Company, supporting the war effort!" thing, and I have a few of those from my great uncle, but I failed to get any contact info.

Okay after catching up with this thread I idly tweeted this in mild fury:

Okay, anyone who calls records 'vinyls' gtfo and never speak to me again thx

and literally ten minutes later Vnyl started following me. Do they have a bot or something? I feel stalked.

Sorry, VNYL

Yeah I could totally see the value of laser reading rare vinyl esp one of a kind 78s etc

that is definitely a real thing. I'll try to see if I can find a link.

they mostly use it on wax cylinders & such

on second thought that's not really germane to this thread of mockery

Yeah i saw that demonstrated by some guys from the library of congress. They can digitally reconstruct a shattered cylinder, really cool

I just got a Love Turntable ad on facebook. 50% off retail!

guys i dunno it looks kinda... cool??

got the same FB ad, impressive how this shite works

Okay, anyone who calls records 'vinyls' gtfo and never speak to me again thx

You know, I'm pretty sure this outs me as an irredeemable grump, and given all the other problems in the world its relatively unimportant, and every generation develops the language they want, but yes, fuck "vinyls". They are records.

We had an occasional customer years ago in the record shop I work in who styled himself as an ageing Glaswegian hard man not to be messed with who always insisted on trying to sell us his "vinyls". He pronounced it vin-ills however, with the first part of the word rhyming with bin, as in rubbish bin. His henchman was called Robbie Williams, and his introduction to the conversation always elicited a gruff rejoinder that he wasn't that one from the boyband though.

guys i dunno it looks kinda... cool??

I suppose it's an interesting gadget for the person who has everything... but then if you have everything, you're going to want to play your record on your expensive sound system.

The only "real" buyer for this I can think of is someone who 1) listens to most of their music with Bluetooth headphones and 2) has a super minimalist pad with no TV, stereo, speakers, or whatever. But is this the kind of person who's going to buy a bunch of records when they can stream on Spotify without adding to the clutter?

oh i thought you could stream it to your stereo. to be honest i still can't picture it actually moving, in operation. i wouldn't be surprised if it were completely fake, in the end.

but cheap bluetooth compatible tts already exist http://www.audio-technica.com/cms/turntables/d41892c53111caf9/index.html and anyway you could probably hook up any old tt to a bluetooth speaker with a bluetooth transmitter/receiver

if you already have a stereo I don't really see why you'd place your tt far from the stereo

none of this makes sense to me - you might as well just connect a turntable to a power outlet and nothing else, place your favorite Andy Gibb thrift shop score on the platter, and spin it around while you stream it on Youtube

aaarghgh

100% chance this will be sold at urban outfitters

I had the Optonica version of the Sharp turntable pictured above which had next track & previous track buttons both on the turntable and on the remote. A turntable with a remote! There were direct-access buttons too so you could punch in track 7 or such. It actually worked quite well as long as the record was clean and had reasonably wide gaps between tracks. But on albums where the delineations between tracks are really narrow, it couldn't find them at all.

Even if it turns out to work really well, I won't be buying LOVE because, well, it's called LOVE. I dunno, just getting irked at all the companies trying to sell me some sort of LOVE these days, like every other new item in the grocery store freezer case. That or a heart in the logo. Just, stop.

I remember seeing a bunch of those front-loading turntables in the '80s. And linear tracking was a huge selling point -- all your records are being ruined by tonearms that don't move in a straight line!

Hey You Guys! The LOVE is now almost half-off!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/493608538/love-the-worlds-first-intelligent-turntable?ref=61fr6y

https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/358/361/93803d477f2596ed4922992cb8c8fc5e_original.gif?w=680&fit=max&v=1485947091&auto=format&gif-q=50&q=92&s=9e82f63fd3c1f91c3fe7b26c13d8a821

Damn, 599 dollars. I was so close.

https://ask.audio/articles/when-you-die-your-ashes-can-be-pressed-into-vinyl-records