Roll your own stereo turntable

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By Gareth Branwyn
Posted 2009/02/28 @ 12:03 pm
Category Music

The thought never occurred to me: scratch-building your own turntable. Paulo Rebordao writes:

This is a record player complete with a servo controlled arm that I’ve designed and built during the last 10 months. It has a few unusual features and I think it looks Way Cool!!!

Besides some general info on the workings, I also made available the schematics and software for downloading.

The Turntable

BY Gareth Branwyn

Gareth Branwyn is a freelancer writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture, including the first book about the web (Mosaic Quick Tour) and the Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. He is currently working on a best-of collection of his writing, called Borg Like Me.

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4 Responses to Roll your own stereo turntable

Anonymous on February 28th, 2009 at 12:20 pm said:

Record, that is a SteamPunk thing? ;-}

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jammit on February 28th, 2009 at 12:56 pm said:

That’s what we old timers used before compact disks. It relied not on the optical properties of a laser to read pits in a reflective surface, but instead measured the “valleys” and “mountains” encoded on a disk by scraping a probe over the surface with a diamond tipped probe.

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Steven F. Scharff on February 28th, 2009 at 8:15 pm said:

Les Paul (yes, the same Les Paul who made all those guitars) built his own turntable back in the 1940′s using a flywheel from a Cadillac engine driven by an electrical motor salvaged from a dental drill.

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TD on March 1st, 2009 at 8:27 am said:

I think that using a gear belt to drive the platter is a bad idea. Each time a tooth engages or disengages it will modulate the motion of the platter. Stepper motors are not ideal for the same reason- use a servomotor.

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