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Turntable Tech
Love that vinyl sound, but hate the wear and tear a stylus causes when it plays your favorite record? Have we got a gadget for you:
The Laser Turntable employs patented technology that produces phenomenal fidelity while never physically touching the record, thus eliminating the deterioration to the album's surface inflicted by conventional turntables.
It can be yours for a measly $15,000. And you thought bicyling was an expensive hobby.
I'm pretty sure this is the tech various museums and universities are using to record and preserve extremely rare and fragile cylinder and acetate disk recordings. I'm still not completely sure how you can scan something like this with a laser and not have it digitized in some manner, but the site claims it's analog all the way. Which is good, because people crazy enough to spend the $$$ on a gadget like this are also crazy enough to think analog is always better than digital.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue of analog better than digital might have been correct at one time, but likely not now. Given that there's a finite amount of sound clarity that can be generated in a medium that is mass-reproduced, it would seem that the difference would depend on how much data you want to encode in the digital format, no? Anything else would be that annoying hiss that audiophiles tend to get all chubbed over...
Posted by: ronaprhys on May 23, 2006 01:11 PM