Microscopic Image Of A Vinyl Record

This article is in five parts.

Microscopic image of a vinyl record.

The white fibers and specks in the photos are the sources audio problems. Old forms of stylus. The microscope views show the surface conditions the stylus encounters as it tracks in the record groove. Posted by jason kottke nov 06 2014.

Microscope world recently took an old vinyl record and put it under a metallurgical microscope to see what the grooves looked like at high magnification. Unfortunately records were both hurt and injured during the making of these microscopic pictures. But i d already copied them to my computer using what else dak s incomparable lp to mp3 system. Stylus tracking and test records.

Record wear and the elliptical stylus. A 6 3 megapixel microscope digital camera was used to capture the images. When you look really closely at record grooves like at 1000x magnification you can see the waveforms of the music itself. Microscopic images shared this image on their twitter some months back showing what a record s groove looks like under 1000x magnification.

Microscopic photo of vinyl record grooves. I also show electron micrographs of other. Click any label for an enlarged image. This first vinyl record image was captured at 100x magnification using reflected light through the objective lens.

Scroll down to see examples. Here s one of my dirty records. The appearance of the grooves.