Cutting records at home with a lathe is not new technology. Prior to cheap audio tape (about 60 years ago) portable lathes and home consoles with both a turntable AND a lathe weren't uncommon. An Australian audio obsessive, Paul Butler Tayar with his Machina.Pro crew, has reengineered the lathe for contemporary home use and named it the Desktop Record Cutter.

The DRC is engineered to cut high-quality grooves into vinyl, not into the somewhat-fragile lacquer of an acetate like in the old days, so hopefully this should produce clean and close-to-perfect copies of your personal recordings (no pirate/bootlegs, please!), which you can play like any other record. However, currently the playback volume only grades at "dub-cut" volume, so your cut (aka carver) will be mastered at less-than-proper release volume. Which is fine for one-offs or short-run releases. Here is a Kickstarter page if you'd like to help this group achieve its production goals, or if you wanna just read the deep details of the project. It is pretty cool, and there are a LOT of interesting pictures and other bits to check out. Oh, this is a sexy analog-on-analog process, but WHERE IS THE RCA input?

h/t: Ms.Tweed