What do you do if you love analog audio formats, but want to hop off the vinyl bandwagon? Amanda Ghassaei, currently a grad student at MIT, has found a way to combine the charm of records with the sustainability of trees by laser-cutting records onto wood.

The technical details, from the project's webpage:

These records were cut on an Epilog 120 Watt Legend EXT to a theoretical precision of 1200dpi (though the kerf of the cut and some tricks I used to avoid crashing the laser cutter dropped the actual precision down by ~1/6). The audio on the records has a bit depth between 4-5 bit and a sampling rate up to about 4.5kHz. So far I've successfully cut audio on wood, acrylic, and paper, and I'm sure there are many more materials that would work. I wrote the Processing sketch that generates the record cutting paths so that it can be modified for any song, material, cutting machine, record size, and turntable speed

It's important to note that this method of record production is more of a novelty, as the bandwidth of the audio signal is limited to 4.5 kHz, while the bandwidth of CD-quality audio is 44.1 kHz.

Check out a video about the project below and listen to Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in all its wooden low quality glory, and find more videos here.

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