What I find additionally amazing, is that you can turn your amp off, ensure your immediate environment is reasonably quiet, am still hear the music faintly as the stylus moves through the grooves.
Iām going to do this as an āELI5ā
Sound is essentially frequencies of vibrations. We have evolved to decode vibrations travelling through a medium (air, water, solids) and understand information through it. We transmit these vibrations, as well as receive them. Over the extremely lengthy period of our physical evolution, the information we transfer has become extremely complex, comparable to our other main information input faculties - sight and taste and touch.
Back to vibrations. We create sound by creating vibrations, and āhearā sound by decoding vibrations. āHi fidelityā is a higher resolution of sound.We can create sound by, for example, clapping our hands together which creates certain frequencies of vibration, that travel through the air and are decoded by a listeners inner ear/cochlea/brain.
Image if you had a device - a kind of membrane or drum perhaps, so finely balanced that these āvibrationsā effected it, causing it to predictably react. And imagine that part of this reaction was to āimprintā a ācopyā or āsimulacrumā of these vibrations onto a receiving platform. An analogy would be like tapping a pencil-point to a beat, onto a travelling strip of paper. The 'dots or/and dashes would represent the beat you are conveying.
With vinyl records, the original recording is made by ācuttingā a very tight spiral onto a spinning metal disk (covered in a special coating) via a āneedleā. It is so finely controlled, that reversing the procedure - having a similar needle and arm riding through this pre-cut groove, reproduces the original vibrations back the other way. Amplified, we have sound coming from the record player. Subsequent disks (for market) are done by pressing, or stamping vinyl disks using the original metal āmaster diskā.
And in winding this up, I am slow to realise that you were probably pulling my leg, this isnāt 1970, we have internet, and you could have googled this and got a better explanation, in hi-res video ffs.
Slight digress, but hereās a mindfucker for you:
At the dentist the other day, I discovered that my insurance companyā¦sets the priceā¦to the dentistā¦for proceduresā¦
70 odd bucks a year, 1500 dentists to choose from, and the prices are set so you know what youāll pay on each item number,
Then you can have your own private dental/extras insurance and claim the full rebate back from them as well on top of that.
Iād been with Latrobe top extras for years, (which is really good), but had let it lapse for a year or 2 and they wouldnāt give me any of the benefits Iād built up over 20 years prior if I re upped with them, ā¦ so I went with AHM top extras, ā¦ Unlimited Gen Dental and No waiting period on it either. ( I couldnāt believe that, & had to ring & confirm)
As a for instance, one item was worth up to $190 at some Dentists, but with a smile m/ship, was $120 with any of their member Dentists, and the AHM rebate on it was about $58, ā¦ so from $190 odd to $62, and youāre done.