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http://www.laserturntable.com/

Note, other than reading an article about some laser turntable a couple of years ago [and may not have been this product] and googling for "laser record player", I have no knowledge as to how well devices such as these sound. I neither recommend this product nor warn you to run away screaming from it.

What if you could appreciate the warmth of the analogue vinyl, without having anything like a needle touch the record.

What if you use what a CD player uses. Laser technology. You can...

Two Tracking Laser beams are directed to the left and to the right shoulders of the groove of the record. Only the part of the beams that reach the groove are reflected to two PSD (Position Sensitive Detector) optical semiconductors. The part of the beams that fall on the land area of the record are deflected and not picked up by the PSD devices. The signals are sent to a microprocessor via analog to digital converters, then to servos to maintain the reader head position directly above the groove.

laser tracking

Two additional laser beams are directed at the left groove wall and the right groove wall just below the tracking beams. Modulation on the individual grooves is reflected to scanner mirrors and onto left and right photo optical sensors. The variations of the modulated light cause the audio sensors to develop an electrical representation of the mechanical modulation of the grooves. The entire sound reproduction chain is analog.

Just what the doctor ordered. A record player with frickin' laser beams attached.

Yours for only fourteen grand, plus tax!

I dunno, I've heard from multiple places that records have a much greater frequency response than CDs before they've been worn down. Granted the physical contact of the needle with the storage medium slowly wears this fidelity down, but with laser based record players coming out it looks like you really can get higher audio quality than a CD that won't degrade. Then again this could all just be the vinyl camp's nostalgia-driven propaganda.

There is one commercially, but don't expect them to be available in walmart any time soon...

http://www.laserturntable.com/main.html

$10,000 a pop. And that's the 'sale price'.

The technology for playing records by 'reading' them has been around for quite a few years, I believe the original example being the Finial turntable that came out in the 80s, later seen as the ELP turntable.

I've seen and heard the ELP 'tables on several occasions, mostly at the Consumer Electronics Show. They require the records to be scrupulously clean in order to avoid read errors and be playable. The sound quality is OK but nothing to write home about.

As mentioned by the company in the link above, they mention how their laser turntable can scan in groove areas that are undamaged. Nothing new to see here, except claiming previous art as new.

Check this page: http://www.laserturntable.com/about/sound.html

The japanese have been doing this for a while now

http://www.laserturntable.com/

I keep coming close to selling off all of my old vinyl. Then I keep holding on to it, hoping that Laser Turntables will come down in price, so I can rip them all before they fall apart. Many of them are just too badly aged to get decent quality audio out of them.

The big lie is that since vinyl is an 'analog' medium, the sound waves direct from the recording are going to be pressed on the record. NOT! It would sound like drek if it was, as the old records did. In almost all cases VINYL IS DIGITALLY MASTERED BEFORE PRESSING! This lets sound engineers do all the tweaking we've come to expect, it is not a simple loss of quality. So any 'analog' benefit is lost before the pressing. You do though get the wonderful analog degradation as micro-scratches and dust accumulate on your record. Being analog, the grooves on your records are the actual shape of the sound waves, but since your records were digitally mastered before pressing, they're not smooth analog curves, they're slightly boxy representing the sampling.

If you like vinyl, using a record preservative like LAST record preservative (review here) can extend the life of your records dramatically. But it can certainly never make them sound better than they did when they were digitally mastered. If you REALLY don't want to damage your record, there are even laser turntables (here) that just scan the grooves. Now I just need one of those in my car :)