Have you ever wondered how a vinyl player actually plays a record? How Elvis' crooning voice can slip from a vinyl right into your ears like he's standing beside you (ignoring the odd scratch or bump of course – nothing is perfect)? Well, wonder no more. Microscopic Images shared this image on their Twitter some months back, showing what a record's groove looks like under 1000x magnification.

The stylus, or needle, is vibrated by the grooves in the LP, which moves magnets placed near a coil. The coil in turn generates electricity, which gets amplified into an audio signal.

And now vinyl enthusiast Ben Krasnow has taken it a step further by creating a stop-motion video of the needle moving through a record's grooves, explaining how he used his electron microscope to image the record.

[H/T: Kottke.org]