3 ms·
Has anyone ever worked out / quantified what kind of depth difference in a vinyl groove you'd need to beat the CD digital signal for "too subtle to capture"?
by zimpenfish 4y ago
Has anyone ever worked out / quantified what kind of depth difference in a vinyl groove you'd need to beat the CD digital signal for "too subtle to capture"?
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoYou need roughly an extra 60dB of dynamic range to match CD. The largest groove deviation on vinyl - nominal 0dB - is around 23um. To add 60dB you have to multiply by 1000, which gets you 23mm. And increase the thickness correspondingly. This has has tragic consequences for the size and weight of the disk. Although it wouldn't be playable because the stylus would be pulling hundreds of Gs. For the short period for which it survived it would be hot enough to melt the vinyl. (Actually it would probably catch fire.) You can imagine an optical reader - the've been built for for vinyl, but for some reason they never caught on - but if you're going to do that you may as well have a sub-micron digital data stream in a much smaller disk.
- KerrAvon 4y agoThere’d still be a market for optical vinyl readers — a playback mechanism that didn’t degrade your mint copies of old LPs would be treasured by a lot of people. The old laser turntables never caught on due to the expense — $10,000 a few decades ago, in those dollars at the time — and due to dust and other imperfections causing severe audio glitches that wouldn’t show up or would be less severe with a stylus. These problems should be solvable with current technology, though.
- sbaiddn 4y agoThe extra information could be stored in the non-audible spectrum of the vinyl. But the reconstruction would be complicated and it would wear out fast. There were some ultrasonics technologies that were aborted when Phillips introduced the CD