These tiny records now have their own miniature record player

Tiny Vinyl, which makes playable 4-inch vinyl records, is releasing a player to spin them. When the startup Tiny Vinyl launched last year, its product was simultaneously more than a century old and brand new. The Nashville-based company had taken the vinyl record and shrunk it down to the handheld size of just 4 inches in diameter, and made it possible to play a single song on each side on most conventional record players. At the time, Neil Kohler, the cofounder, told me that turning the vinyl format into a miniature version was a feat of engineering. “The physics of playing vinyl at that scale were not trivial to overcome,” he said.