Yup. My parents totally listened to the Beatles this way when they were kids.

So, the russians were innovators in the world's "if people want the content, they'll find a way to get it" movement.

Take that HBO!
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news…

UK INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER BT has said that Game of Thrones is proof that 'piracy' is becoming acceptable, and it doesn't like that one bit.

Speaking at an event in London on Wednesday, BT global director of group industry policy Julian Ashworth said that the torrent record set by the season finale of Game of Thrones season four - which saw the show being downloaded illegally over seven million times in just a few days - is proof that 'piracy' is being accepted as normal.

There's a great scene in Todorovsky's "Stilyagi" depicting this. Fantastic movie with a colourful take on the era. Todorovsky came for the showing at SIFF in 2010, I believe. Trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOwK0kr1g…

Sounds like the private lathe cuts that were popular among DJs and indie nerds in the last decade or so here. I'd love to see one of these.

Der Spiegel says a Polish engineer, Stanislaw Filon, brought a Telefunken (German) vinyl lathe to Leningrad and opened a legal front business recording "audio letters" and amateur musical performances, then started the underground bootleg movement. Others produced hand-made copies of the lathe and the movement spread.

You can paste this URL directly into Google Translate and get another link to a translated version (as far as I can tell the story didn't appear in Der Spiegel's much-better-written English version):

http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/roentge…

I don't think these were lathe cuts. Judging from the pictures you can see in a google image search, which show the shape of the label areas of the originals, these were pressings.

Bear in mind that 1950's xray film was on celluloid, not polyester like more modern stuff. Celluloid can be softened with solvents, water, or steam.

I suspect they took a smuggled record, which at the time were pretty sturdy mixes of powdered rocks and shellac, and made a negative "master" of it, perhaps in a casting process with plaster or a similar material or even a low-temperature melting white-metal alloy, like salvaged linotype. Then, they softened the xray film and pressed it against the negative. This would be a process you could do in someone's kitchen, with no special equipment, just a stove, some pots and a few pieces of wood.

@6, that's a great reverse-engineering scenario. There is this picture of a groove-cutting lathe in the photo gallery of the Nov. 8, 2011 Der Spiegel article on this subject that I mentioned @5 above: http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/roentg…

My translation of the caption:

Recording apparatus: The X-ray records would be manufactured with mechanical recording devices like this. A needle scratched the sound groove into the photo stock. In order to play the "flexidisk," a regular stiff record was needed underneath as a base. The machine in the picture is on exhibit at the Radio Museum in Moscow. The designer is not known in this case.

What look like label impressions on some of the records pictured in that gallery may just be the darker gray of the ungrooved/unrecorded area in the middle, since the grooves scatter light and look lighter. But perhaps different bootlegging groups developed different methods.