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Vinyl record grooves under electron microscope

Chris Supranowitz is a researcher at The Insitute of Optics at the University of Rochester. Along with a number of other spectacular studies (such as quantum optics, trapping of atoms, dark states and entanglement), Chris has decided to look at the grooves of a vinyl record using the institute's electron microscope...

 
Here is a shot of a number of record grooves (the dark bits are the top of the grooves, i.e. the uncut vinyl):
 
Grooves
 
The grooves magnified 500x – the little bumps are dust on the record:

Record_grooves
 
And here's a single groove even closer still, magnified 1000 times:

Record_groove
 
Chris also did the pits in a CD – here's what they look like, just for contrast:

Cd_pits
 
Chris decided to take the whole electron microscope image one step further, and created a blue/red 3-dimensional image of the record groove! So, if you have a pair of 3D glasses (sorry, the ones you got from watching Avatar won't work – you need red on the left, blue on the right), throw them on and take a look at this amazing picture:
 
Record_grooves_3d
 
via SynthGear | Chris Supranowitz
 
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How vinyl records are produced (via Discovery):
 

Mar 16, 2010
Alicia Bernal said...
amazing how much yet I have to know about the world beyond one's comfort zone...
Mar 17, 2010
volenet said...
kinda disappointing we don't know what records they were
Mar 17, 2010
Amazing!
Mar 17, 2010
 said...
There was man who lived who could sing tell the tune of any record by running his nails along it.
Mar 17, 2010
bot said...
amazing!
more close-up vinyl grooves and record production shots, visit
www.deafstar.org
Mar 17, 2010
hblx said...
Irony is it prolly cost less to film that entire segment that it would to license the music in order to feature it...
Mar 17, 2010
bot liked this post.
Mar 18, 2010
Lukas Kvasnak liked this post.
Mar 19, 2010
Marjan Zahed-Kindersley liked this post.
Mar 21, 2010
John Dyer said...
Very very awesome. Took me by surprise.
Mar 22, 2010
xea Baudoin liked this post.
Mar 23, 2010
Tom Freeze liked this post.
Mar 25, 2010
 said...
Are the defects in the grooves on high magnification part of the recordings? or from the pressing stages? would they affect the sound? or just too small to matter?
Apr 29, 2010
brendotroy said...
Anyone know why this was posted (how the author came across it)? I'm just curious -- the researcher is a friend, and I'd like to tell him that some of his old work is getting attention on the web (and why it is).