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This is very cool. I've been pondering this for a while. With all the very expensive audiophile turntables out there it seems that the true goal for an audiop

This is very cool. I've been pondering this for a while. With all the very expensive audiophile turntables out there it seems that the true goal for an audiophile should be listening without degrading the vinyl, this. It also makes me think. This decoding system can pull out essentially height data, height of the groove at moment in time. With that, it's not outside the realm of possibility for us to create a small actuator that takes the place of then stylus, manually moves the turntable needle, recreating the exact sound as if the record were being traditionally played.

Animats 4y ago
Non-contact record players been built.[1] The trouble is, non-contact record players track every tiny bit of dust. Elaborate record cleaning is required. So they're not useful for routine use. Also, they're overly expensive low volume products. The IRENE people are trying machine learning to recognize and remove dust and scratches. That sort of thing is for reading archival items once and generating a archival digital copy at some very high sampling rate and resolution. That's then down-converted for listening. Many early cylinder records sound quite good when played back with modern equipment. It turns out that most of the distortion came from the mechanical playback process, where huge stylus pressures were used to get enough motion to directly drive a speaker membrane. The recording process was making reasonably good recordings. (History of electronics: "We need more volts." "We need more gain." "We need more frequency." "We need more stability." "We need more power capacity." "We need more gates". "We need less heat.") CDs, DVDs, etc. have error-correcting codes, so they don't have this problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
Phrodo_00 4y ago
There exists such a thing as a laser turntable. They're probably not as popular because they came out on the tail end of vinyl being popular, they didn't deal well with dust, and could only play opaque records.

Animats 4y ago

Non-contact record players been built.[1] The trouble is, non-contact record players track every tiny bit of dust. Elaborate record cleaning is required. So they're not useful for routine use. Also, they're overly expensive low volume products. The IRENE people are trying machine learning to recognize and remove dust and scratches. That sort of thing is for reading archival items once and generating a archival digital copy at some very high sampling rate and resolution. That's then down-converted for listening. Many early cylinder records sound quite good when played back with modern equipment. It turns out that most of the distortion came from the mechanical playback process, where huge stylus pressures were used to get enough motion to directly drive a speaker membrane. The recording process was making reasonably good recordings. (History of electronics: "We need more volts." "We need more gain." "We need more frequency." "We need more stability." "We need more power capacity." "We need more gates". "We need less heat.") CDs, DVDs, etc. have error-correcting codes, so they don't have this problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable

Phrodo_00 4y ago

There exists such a thing as a laser turntable. They're probably not as popular because they came out on the tail end of vinyl being popular, they didn't deal well with dust, and could only play opaque records.