Mesmerising video shows a needle moving through vinyl ridges

Vinyl is seeing a resurgence this year after sales of turntables rose by a staggering 240 per cent.

And now a mechanical engineer has captured a close-up view of the intricate grooves used to create its iconic sound through an electron microscope, the Daily Mail reports.

The animation shows the needle vibrating through the ridges that generate and amplify the music.

He began by modifying an original record player stylus to remove the magnets before coating the sections of record with conductive silver.

These sections were then attached to glass microscope slide.

As Mr Krasnow explained: ‘The electron microscope can’t image things that are ‘electrical insulators’ [because] the microscope works by firing electrons at the object that you want to inspect.

“If the object is an insulator, those electrons get trapped inside the object and eventually, if enough electrons get trapped there, the future electrons coming in will be repelled.’

And, he continued, that because like-for-like charges repel each other, one way to solve this problem is to coat the object in something conductive, which in this case was silver.

The stylus works by vibrating in the grooves of the LP, which move the magnets near the coil to generate the electricity that gets amplified into the audio signal.

However, these magnets would have deflected the electrons and distorted the image, so Mr Krasnow removed them and created a makeshift copper needle surrounded in plastic.

Elsewhere, he was able to create real-time imagery but the resolution was too poor to create a good enough quality image.

So he decided to use the micrometre controls on the microscope to move the needle along the groove 50 microns before taking a still frame.

He then repeated this process until he had enough still frames to create a GIF in Photoshop, and changed the playback speed to mimic the actual speed of the record being played.

Scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) are typically used to inspect specimens in labs.

The SEM uses an electron beam to trace over the specimen, while creating an digital replica on a screen.

This digital version is a 3D image that can be manipulated.


As the electron beam traces over the object, it hits the surface and sends secondary electrons from this surface into unique patterns.

A secondary electron detector attracts those scattered electrons and, depending on the number of electrons that reach the detector, registers different levels of brightness on a monitor.

These patterns and images can be used to learn about the surface topography and composition.