When the Soviets Banned Rock Music, Teens Used X-rays to Bootleg Records | Hacker News Reader

When the Soviets Banned Rock Music, Teens Used X-rays to Bootleg Records

smithsonianmag.com

111 pointsmarkmassie26 comments

The title interested me in that I was curious how X-ray images of records could be re-rendered as audio or vinyl discs ...

But no! They took old x-ray prints and pressed the records right into them! It's an excellent idea and one my just-awoken brain could not get to on its own.

I wonder if X-ray images of records could be decoded as audio.

It's been done with regular pictures, there was a really good article about this that I can't find anymore. However it should be more complicated with x-ray images as they are a different mapping between the disc and the image.

Sounds like a great hacking project with access to the right equipment

For science I'm currently trying to get someone to x-Ray an LP. Let's see. Direct digital though, let's skip that film screen rubbish.

>They took old x-ray prints and pressed the records right into them!

How can this even work? Surely the xray prints are not stiff enough to be used as records.

As a child, I recall several times receiving very flexible records as freebies. (Can't recall whether McDonald's ever did it with happy meals...)

The flimsy records played just fine!

I remember magazines in the 80s (e.g. - "Keyboard" magazine) putting in flippy little inserts that played.

I think they're called flexi discs.

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/18/400369975/its-thin-its-plastic...

There is a surprisingly good movie called стиляги about this culture: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt1239426/ - highly recommended for anyone who thinks Brooklyn invented the hipster :)

> highly recommended for anyone who thinks Brooklyn invented the hipster

Heh, this reminds me of a few years ago, when my cousin was visiting us from Russia, and was absolutely ecstatic to meet my friend who looked very much like a hipster stereotype.

Well, that was probably the case in Leningrad and maybe Moscow, but definitely not the rest of the USSR (1/6th of the world's land at that moment). And the situation was not that grave. There was even a magazine printed as blue plastic LPs called Krugozor, with rock bands. I owned a collection of many rock bands on tapes, and no one chased me for that. There was completely otherer problem - Soviet music was banned in the US, you could not buy LP of Pesnyary anywhere in the US.

Krugozor/Kolobok are from the mid to late 60s, after these things were first invented and traded in the 50s.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Грампластинка#.D0.9A.D1.83.D1....

Pink Floyd are the 70-ies, if memory serves. I had tape of the Dark Side of the Moon in 1977. That is a bit late, yes, but could any US resident claim ownership of the 1976 Belarusian single of the year in 1980? http://youtu.be/0rHjakawG8M

What does that have to do with the article? It sounds like a classic case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

The article claims the hunger for American bands among the Soviet teenagers and describes the exotic method for satiating it. I only pointed that situation was more complicated. There were 'voices of freedom' and anticommunism from one side and propaganda from the other. And yes, thank you for the link. Just this week I suggested Mr Simmons - the black American cyber cop is better to leave the US if he wants to land a better professional future.

> could any US resident claim ownership of the 1976 Belarusian single of the year in 1980?

Could any US resident claim ownership of the 1996 North Korea single of the year?

No?

Blame The Censorship!

Maybe you didn't read the article or make it to the end, but it pretty clearly states that the time frame for this was 1950-1958 and then it became obsolete as technology changed and restrictions where eased.

Not saying your point is wrong, just your complaining that the article doesn't cover things outside it's scope.

US Censorship of foreign music would be an interesting follow up to this article. I don't know anything about it, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen...

It is more like market-embedded trait, than actual censorship. I was much surprised, how music landscape of the US is much less diverse than that of the UK.

Such a neat story! I think the history of the underground market for music, movies, and games is fascinating. I'd love to work on a book about it.

> While the vinyl sheets used to print x-rays were much flimsier than records

I doubt the Soviets were making X-rays on vinyl. They would be using acetate like the rest of the world. The record industry was also still using shellac based media in the 50's. Vinyl was not a "thing" back then.

Off by one decade. Shellac compound -> LP changeover occurred in the 50's in most of the world.

Late 50's. Vinyl wasn't common until the 60's.

Information wants to be passed around.

slightly OT but: 1) the whole article reminds me of A Clockwork Orange and 2) all those Eastern Europe Warez Collections that found their way to central/west Europe in the early nineties. If it wasn't for 3DStudio 3/4 on DOS, I think my visual/spatial thinking would be way worse, making it even harder to wrap my mind around view/projection matrices etc.. edit: typos

As soon as I open the page on iOS it redirects to an unrelated advert. This is why I use an adblocker on my PC.

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