Printing records on a 3D printer

Instructables.com employee Amanda Gasey has done an impressive job of creating a technology of three-dimensional printing of records. There is little practical benefit from this yet, but the detailed history of her research and experiments, laid out on instructables, reads like a fascinating detective story. The resolution of the best modern 3D printers is barely enough to achieve a sound quality comparable to the first 19th century audio recordings, but the more interesting the task.







Amanda had a very good Objet Connex500 printer worth a quarter of a million dollars, capable of printing with a resolution of 42 microns along the X and Y axes and 16 microns along the Z axis (600x600x1600 DPI). After numerous experiments, it was possible to achieve sound reproduction with a resolution of 5-6 bits and a sampling frequency of about 10 kilohertz. The sound is accompanied by a characteristic periodic noise created by the printer raster. The model of the surface of the record has such a huge amount of small details that while the recording duration is limited to one minute, it no longer fits in the printer’s memory.



The model itself is generated as follows: the Python script processes the sound file, producing a text sequence of sample values. This sequence is fed to the Processing library, the main purpose of which is to build interactive graphics and diagrams. Using the ModelBuilder library, the model created in Processing is converted to an STL format that the printer understands. Before processing, the sound is subjected to compression and equalization in order to lay it in the tiny dynamic and frequency range of a homemade record.

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A detailed description of the process, with all the technical details and nuances, with the source codes of all the scripts and links to the ready-made models of several songs of the groups Nirvana, Joy Division, Daft Punk, Radiohead and others to instructables .