Final Scratch--The Analog Hack: New York Times Year in Ideas 2001

THE YEAR IN IDEAS: A TO Z.; Final Scratch
By MARGIE BORSCHKE
Published: December 9, 2001

Electronic music has always been a paradox of sorts. Though the D.J.'s who produce it love digital technology, they continue to rely for their source material on what many consider an archaic item: the analog vinyl record. Digital files have obvious advantages -- they don't scratch or skip, they're virtually weightless and they're easy to distribute and share -- and over the past decade, many machines have appeared on the market that allow D.J.'s to manipulate sound digitally. But digital interfaces ignore the physical facts of D.J.'ing -- the comfortable feel of a record moving back and forth under a D.J.'s hand, the responsiveness of vinyl and the spatial and visual clues D.J.'s use to remember and find tracks and beats.

FinalScratch is an attempt to solve the D.J.'s quandary. The mixing system, developed this year by a group of hackers in the Netherlands, is the first invention that allows D.J.'s to use their preferred analog materials -- two turntables, a mixer and a vinyl record -- to manipulate digital music files.

A 12-inch vinyl disc, known as the FinalScratch record, is encoded with digital signals instead of a song; when it is played on a normal turntable, it functions something like a computer modem, sending information, instead of music, through the stylus. FinalScratch then uses that information to manipulate a digitally stored piece of music. When the D.J. manually speeds up or slows down the turntable, or ''scratches'' the vinyl, the digital music file is instantly altered in exactly the same way a real record would be. It is a marriage of high and low technology -- 21st-century digital music, tweaked and massaged by the D.J.'s old-fashioned hand. Margie Borschke