You can now buy video encoded vinyl records

Analogue sight and sound.

Austrian company Supersense is reviving the previously obsolete technology of encoding analogue video onto vinyl records, Gizmodo reports.

Using “VinylVideo” technology developed by Vienna-based artist Gebhard Sengmüller in the ’90s, Supersense is now selling a converter box that allows specially produced VinylVideo records to be played between a standard turntable and television. Watch Techmoan’s introduction to the medium below:

While Sengmüller’s original technology was mostly used in art installations, with a handful of records sold to collectors, Supersense has worked with record label Subterrania to develop four A/V playable vinyl records by Motörhead, the Courettes, Reverend Beat-Man and Frankie Stubbs.

Working with scientist Martin Diamant, Supersense have the facility to cut vinyl video records in their own production and recording studio. Earlier this year, krautrock maverick Holger Czukay’s 5xLP retrospective Cinema box set featured a VinylVideo 7″.

The converter box works much like a phono amplifier, boosting and splitting the audio signal from a VinylVideo record, into video and mono audio signals. The resulting image is grainy, and limited to a black and white picture.

As Supersense explains: “The video on a VinylVideo is stored as a stereo signal and not as the usual video signal. That’s why you need this audiovisual phono pre-amplifier, which serves as a “translator” between your record player and your TV.”

Almost one hundred years ago, Scottish television pioneer John Logie Baird experimented with recording a mechanical television signal onto gramophone records. The short-lived Phonovision concept was utlimately supplanted by Betamax and VHS.

Find out more from the Supersense website and watch an infomercial about the concept below.

VinylVideo Infomercial from Gebhard Sengmüller on Vimeo.

Photos by Alexander Gotter