A Flexi disc sound recording is a thin vinyl sheet with a molded-in spiral stylus groove designed to be playable on a normal phonograph turntable. Before the advent of the compact disc, they were sometimes used as a means to include sound with printed material such as magazines and music instruction books. A flexi disc could be molded with speech or music and bound into the text with a perforated seam, at very little cost and without any requirement for a hard binding. One problem with using the thinner vinyl was that the stylus's weight, combined with the flexi disc's lack of weight, would sometimes cause the disc to stop spinning on the turntable and become held in place by the stylus. For this reason, most flexi discs had a spot on the face of the disc for a coin, or other small, flat, weighted object to enforce the circular motion.

A two sided flexible sheet record of the underwater sounds produced by humpback whales was included with the January 1979 issue of National Geographic magazine. With a production order of 10,500,000 copies, it became the largest single press run of any record at the time.

Evatone Soundsheets are the brand name of the original flexi discs, which were introduced to the industry in 1960.

Bones are Soviet-era DIY punk flexi discs, scratched into smooth sheets of plastic using a modified turntable. They are so called because one cheap, reliable source of suitable raw material is discarded medical x-rays, which have the added benefit of including ready-made and interesting images. This format was particularly attractive to politically suppressed punk rock music, since other publishing outlets were much less accessible.

See also

• McDonald's Menu Song

External links

• Evatone's 2000 announcement ending production of the "Soundsheet".

Audio engineering