PrintableCharts
AUDIO CARRIERS

1 / 3 · mockup · mid-century

AUDIO CARRIERS

seven carriers over a century at one scale, and what each one brought first

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Standard$1.50

Payment and email are handled by Paddle. The download link arrives by email — no account, no password.

Formats
A4 · A3 · A2
What you get
Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject
music · everyone · comparison · music room

The silhouettes are drawn to one scale, declared by the rule beneath them. Disc sizes follow from the inch names, the record groove from IEC 98, the compact disc geometry from the Red Book.

A RECORD TURNS EVENLY, AND THEREFORE PLAYS UNEVENLY

The disc turns at a constant angular speed while the needle works its way inwards. IEC 98 puts the groove between radii of 146.05 mm and 60.325 mm, so 51 centimetres of groove pass the needle every second on the first track and only 21 on the last. The same music is written two and a half times more tightly.

The result is audible: the last track of a side has the worst treble and the most distortion, which is why engineers spent a century putting the quieter pieces there and the loud ones at the start.

The compact disc does the exact opposite. It holds the linear speed constant at 1.2 metres per second and pays with rotation, which falls by a factor of 2.3 from the inner edge of the program area to the outer. The price is a drive that must keep changing speed; the gain is the same recording density from the first minute to the seventy-fourth.

On the sheet

  • The silhouettes are drawn to one scale, declared by the rule beneath them. Disc sizes follow from the inch names, the record groove from IEC 98, the compact disc geometry from the Red Book.
  • Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
  • Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

  • Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
  • All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
  • White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
  • Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
  • No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 8 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

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