Two Turntables and a Laser Beam

karmaflux writes "Dig this. A turntable that uses a five-beam laser system to read your vinyl. Rad, eh? The cheap ($13k) model doesn't do 60 or 90 rpm. Spring for the good one ($20k). Note: an excellent vacuum cleaner is included in both models. What style this company has to release this product during the current MP3 frenzy! " I've just gotten back into collecting and enjoying vinyl records, so this is terribly interesting to me, although the price looks to be a bit too steep, and I doubt I can use it to scratch at parties.

Comments

From the wicky-wicky-scratch-wicky-scratch dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

With this thing, I can be like Will Smith and lift all my beats off old school songs!

WICKY-WICKY WILD WICKY-WILD WILD...

LT

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do "Both products include an excellent vacuum cleaner"????

Re:LT

[djdead]

if you've ever heard a record played, you've probably noticed a lot of clicks and pops. this is almost always due to dust and dirt on the record and to inferior recording techniques etc. to get the most out of vinyl it should be cleaned. not only does this reduce/eliminate the dust and static from a record for better sound, for those of us who don't have $13k for one of these things, it reduces wear on the needle.

Re:Muy Nifty!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, that Final Scratch thing isn't for Linux!

Dang BeOS weenies :P

It looks damn cool, though.

Re:8th post

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, 14th.

More info

[Anonymous Coward]

Look here for more info on the subject.

Re:Dr. CPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a spoof. This sounds suspiciously like the cred of Buckaroo Banzai:

Brain Surgeon... check!
Music Lover ... Check!
Leader of a Hong Kong musical Ensemble... Check!
Into high-tech, retro hardware... Check!
(I bet this TT uses an oscillation overthruster!)
Joke Name... Check!

"Yu've" all been had, methinks.

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to flame you (much), but if you were not heavily into expensive gear in the 80's when records and turntables were at their peak (and some turntables were works of art in themselves) you don't have a baseline for comparison.

There are sounds in records which do not come out on CDs. And there is a sound artifact in CDs which does not belong in the music, and is not on the record.

Do records need to be cleaned? Yes. Can you touch them with your fingers? NO. Is it all a pain in the ass? Yes.

However, those who are willing to put up with the extra work, and spend a lot of money for good equipment, end up with a sound you don't find on CD.

If you are ever in Framingham, MASS. USA, stop by Natural Sound on Rt 9 (behind Shoppers World Mall) They still had some high end esoteric tweak shop turntables, and maybe they will demo one for you.

Join Slashdot. Visit amazing new lands. Meet interesting new people. Flame them.

analog vs digital

[Anonymous Coward]

Analog will always sound better, its a contiuous real time stream of information. granted the delivery methods (needles, tape heads) leave a lot to be desired but i would imagine a non contact laser system would be excellent. Digital even with really high sampling rates (DVD audio) is still broken up. Plus you miss out on some of the extras of analog recording like inadvertant compression which really gives records their warmth. I'll take live at leeds on vinyl any day over the digital remaster.

nothing new..

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard about this thing months ago. The only great feature would be saving broken/scratched records. I'll take a Technics SL1200MK2 any day of the week. And no, you can't scratch with it.

Re:nothing new..

[p0d]

Someone finally pointed that out. It's a tray loaded internal mechanism...no scratching. :( Get 2 SL-1200s and a Pioneer mixer and you're set (John Digweed use the above) -p0d

EB Sound

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find Linn gives superb reproductive results.

Not only that, she can cook too!

L. Ron. Hubbard.

What sound artifact?

[Anonymous Coward]

What sound artifact appears in CD's? Listening to vinyl reminds me of tube amplifiers, way too much money for a very small thing.

intended audience

[Anonymous Coward]

What style this company has to release this product during the current MP3 frenzy! Obviously their target market, is not that of cheap mp3 junkies..

Re:Audiophiles

[Anonymous Coward]

Tosh! Of course, I'm not denying the importance of the listening environment but the hardware is of as much more importance.

As other people have said, turntables of this variety have been around for some time and are in my opinion of excellent quality if not a little over-priced. There was an audiophile shop here in Liverpool that had one on demo a few years back, providing the vinyl is of sufficient quality it sounded a damn sight better than a lot of the digital mediums around at the minute.

CED Laserdisk would've been a kick ass audio fmt

[Anonymous Coward]

Conceptually the principles behind the old CED laserdisk players (aka RCA needlevision) is not that complex. It could have easily been implemented 40 or 50 years ago. Just think if that 3MHz of bandwidth on the old CED laserdisks was totally devoted to audio. The S/N ratio could be pushed to nearly infinity. Audio quality would blow away vinyl, CDs, and even the best proposed DVD audio spec (if they ever decide on one). Note that "analog" != "bad sound quality" This is a marketing ploy that successfully duped a lot of people. For instance. VCD are digital, but analog Laserdisc blows it away, but digital DVD bloes that away, yet DVD is blown away by 70mm film which is analog. Digital/analog has absolutely nothing to do with "quality".

Dr. Chung Ping Yu -- For Real

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not improbable that a Brain Surgeon would be the Leader of the Hong Kong Medical Association Orchestra.

HKMA Committees and Members (1999-2000) does list Dr. Yu Chung Ping (family name first here) as a Vice-Chairman of the Orchestra & Choir Committee (standing committee #22).

--
Kirk Hilliard (kirk AT ghoti.com)
The Adventures of Dr. Chung Ping Yu: Across the Octave

lalalalala

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:Don't trust

[Anonymous Coward]

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No wow and flutter specs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I trust these folks to do quite well in the wow and flutter dept., but they are not zero. Also occurs to me that the digital part is probably in the speed control system.

Nicholas Bodley

Re:Been around for ages

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but the ones ten years ago didn't come with such excellent vacuum cleaners, methinks.

Re:Fuck the DJs and the horse they rode in on!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Question:

Has anybody made a comment stronger than, "this isn't targeted towards DJs."?

Answer:

I certainly haven't seen one.

So please actually respond to something and don't just shoot your mouth off on abusive rants because you don't happen to like DJs. You're the only one who's complaining about other people's listening habits and the fact that they like to talk about them.

So if you STILL can't figure it out:

1) People realize that this is not aimed at DJs, and you're complaining that they say so.
2) Most turntables aren't aimed at you, either.
3) The world does not revolve around you.
4) Deal with it.

A punched card might be nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Face down, and 9-edge first.

Re:Big mouth and No Brains

[Anonymous Coward]

the "sterile sound" you speak of just means less distortion. Its just like tube amps vs. transistor. Its a matter of what you're used to.

Theoretically, you could put a DSP in your CD player to add back that same distortion, but since the people who want that distortion already have zillion dollar vinyl collections and turntables, I doubt it would sell very well.

Whip out that Big 10 inch!

[Anonymous Coward]

Natalie Portman, topless and patrified, just loves my Big 10 Inch record of her favorate blues!

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[Anonymous Coward]

man nyquist

man dithering

man antialiasing

your simple 'intuitive' understanding of signals is rather amusing.

Re:digitize it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so wrong, no wonder you feel that way. 0-9? That makes no sense whatsoever.

The people who argue analog is better than digital are people who've spent way too much money at the behest of the marketing department of major analog equipment vendors. Anyone who argues that vinyl is better than 96Khz 24bit audio has obviously never compared them.

Re:Muy Nifty!

[Anonymous Coward]

It sure looks cool, but unfortunately, the latency kills it. Its ok if all you wanna do is match beats and fade, but you can do that with a pair of varispeed mp3 players for much less $$$.

Its just too hard to scratch with more than a millisecond of latency from vinyl movement to audio out. Beos naturally adds 3-4, their mp3 player gets that up to 12, and their method of reading the velocity can cause up to 40ms of latency. Neat idea though.

Re:Skratch DJs of the world rejoice!

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong, because the laser has to track the groove exactly, without any physical connection. Next time you scratch, notice that the vinyl moves laterally ever so slightly. The needle, resting in a groove can follow that easily. The laser on the other hand, cannot.

Not 1950, ca 1935

[Anonymous Coward]

A playable magnetic tape recording of the Berlin Philharmonic from the mid 1930's exists.

Re:Not 1950, ca 1935

[Audin]

Sure, the germans used magnetic recorders (wire, in this case) to disguise hitler's whereabouts during WW2... It was another of those technologies which the germans worked on in the late 20s and early 30s while everyone else ignored them.

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest getting a Stanton or a Numark. They are really cheap (you can find the stanton for $180 w/cartridge and needle), provide decent sound, and look good. ALWAYS go direct drive though. - Beeb

Re:For $13500...

[Anonymous Coward]

I BEG to differ re: belt drive turntables being poor. Although they do "wear" out quicker (the belt that is) they don't couple the noise from the motors onto the record itself nearly as much as direct drive. In fact, almost ALL reference players use belt drives system - arguably the BEST reference player on the market, the Clearaudio Master Reference, uses 3 motors with a belt between them driving the table. Check out the picture at:
http ://www3.50megs.com/engchye/image/Clearaudio_Master _Reference.JPG?50m=image

Who would want to listen to records anyway?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

NOTHING I know I'd want to hear is out on a record but not a CD. CD's sound SO much better than a stupid record. I'm not listening to lame hippy music though.

Re:Who would want to listen to records anyway?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well lucky you. I know some stuff of Virgil Fox I've only ever seen on 8-track :p

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[Anonymous Coward]

No way! Digital clocks are way better than analog ones, because you can read them faster.

"digital" and "analog" DO affect quality

[Anonymous Coward]

"analog" may more accurately reflect the actual real-life sounds/visuals, but "digital" will do it "really really well" for "aeons longer" than analog without any loss in quality

Kinda hard to scratch when it's in a box

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the picture of the turntable (there's a link to a "full size" pic). Exactly how do you expect to scratch a record when it's loaded like a laserdisc? You may as well try scratching floppy disks. :P~~

Re:Big mouth and No Brains

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not spend all that money feeding the poor?

Whine! Whine!

The Freeloading Left (TM)

Twat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you've got issues. Take some ritalin or something.

Don't get all worked up over nothing!

Re:CED Laserdisk would've been a kick ass audio fm

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a note - CEDs had nothing to do with laserdisks.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[Anonymous Coward]

Theoretically, maybe. But I had one of those CED players and for whatever reason they had pretty poor resolution in the colour dimension (it was very easy to see "colour contours"). They had a, uh, nifty way of skipping, though :)

Re:How to spend that money

[Anonymous Coward]

Then there're people like Knuth, that build a pipe organ in the corner :)

Re:needles and dirt/tabletop clean room

[Anonymous Coward]

"Styli" is good. No double "i".

If the budget allows, why not invest in a "tabletop clean room"? There are floor-standing booths, I'm fairly sure. Heck, even household vac. cleaners have HEPA filters if they're decently designed!

(HEPA = high efficiency particulate air, probably.)

Nicholas Bodley

Apologies if this is a duplicate sub-topic.

Re:Hang on to your 1200s

[Anonymous Coward]

And suddenly dumping them for the much smaller and more widely playing CDs in the interests of space and money.

Re:But what about the DJs?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why for god's sake doesn't someone out there design an interface to LET you scratch CDs? hell, slap a big skip buffer in there, use a wheel to determine speed/direction of playback... even have the thing really spin if your cerebellum needs it... you're unlikely to scratch more than a few seconds in either direction afaik (IANADJ) so it shouldn't be TOO hard for that matter, use it for mp3s as well :)

Re:Fuck the DJs and the horse they rode in on!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah. "dj's are heroes to most but those suckers never meant shit to me" as they say in some old pop-house record. anyhow, I love my vinyls and I keep buying them and deejaying with them. why? because the stuff I happen to like get's so rarely released on CD's or CD-Singles. simple I think. And I still have no other cdplayer than CD-Rom drive of my PC. and how often you can spot the full-length 12" mixes available on CD-singles? I get sick when I've just mixed the track in and it fades away just after 3 minutes. is one supposed to mix these at all or just "throw" them in? boring.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's compare an ideal, perfect AD converter with an ideal, perfect analog recorder.

An "ideal, perfect" digital system would have an infinite bit depth, and continuous sampling. In other words, it would be indistinguishable from analog.

Let's try to not get too abstract here, I thought we were talking about audio sampling rate and how it applied to hardware/software!?

Nothing new about this idea

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been tried several times. Similar laser turntables have also been very expensive. The problem is that lasers read the vinyl TOO well: every miniscule defect is detected and made audible. This wasn't a problem with old-fashioned stylus playback because of the ratio between the size of the stylus and the groove. The physcial width of the stylus averaged out microscopic variations in the groove wall. The question is whether this new laser turntable managed to simulate a stylus with infinitely small mass but with the virtual physical charactaristics of a real stylus.

What would be really neat is a turntable with real-time DSP pop & click removal so I can listen to my old un-released-on-CD vinyl albums without wasting large amounts of time cleaning them up in software.

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it - Carlos Santayana

NAKED Jacie Chan has nothing to say

[Anonymous Coward]

I am just here for your viewing pleasure

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...........N;;;N:::::::::::::::::NNN;;;;;;;;;;nnnn n
............N;;;N::::::::::::::::N..NN;;;;;;;;;;;; ;N
.............NNNNN:::::::::::::::N....NNNNNMEGALIO N
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Re:NAKED Jacie Chan has nothing to say

[quadong]

First of all. this does not look like Jackie Chan, even if you could spell it right, and second, I told you already that your sampling technique sucks. The only shading you have attempted consists of using semi-colons to show that his left leg is farther away than his right. Is this the best you can do??

Added to this, you haven't even managed to produce enough images to keep them unique in your posts. Maybe we should call you "microlion," huh?

Re:Actually, this is a common oversight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heehee... my favourites for transients like that were my father's translucent Cooks of thunderstorms and Mississippi tugboat whistles. The groove spacing had to be so wide sometimes they looked like the spacing between bands :)

On the other hand, have you seen the warnings on The 1712 Overture and The Short-Tempered Clavier? Those digital balloon pops are pretty ... poppy ... and I never worry about them weakening with repeated plays!

Re:But what about the DJs?

[CowboyNeal]

I'm not God. In fact, I'm really far from it, but the Technics SL-1200 M3Ds ARE my tables. *grin* Sure, it's not the ultra high grade phonographs, and my cartridges are less than a grand, so it's not audiophile quality by any means, but the feel of vinyl is what it's all about. At times a CD feels just too perfect.

Well, that and I can't scratch CD's.

Caution

[Yarn]

Either make sure that your amp has a *proper* phono input or that the table has filtered output, otherwise you'll get uncompensated phono output which sounds 'thin'.

Re:Caution

[Yarn]

I was just saying that because I know someone who got a turntable and was going around saying "its really shitty, i dont know why i bothered" until i plugged it into my amp :)

CD is generally better, but there's something about a slowly spinning disk :)

Re:Caution

[alhaz]

Oh relax, haven't you ever heard of a phono preamp?

If you don't suffer from audiophilia, you can get a reasonable one for under $20.

(I feel blessed that my ears are crude enough to forgive most forms of electrical noise in recordings, my music habit would be a lot more expensive otherwise)

Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[ryder]

Slightly off topic, but I'm looking to add a turntable to my home stereo system. Any brands or anything I should be looking for? You can't walk into a store and buy these things anymore either, so where are they sold?

Thanks

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[syntax]

it depends what you mean by 'decent' and just how much you're going to be doing with it. Seeing how you only want one, I doubt you're going to be doing much DJ action on it. It also depends on whether you want belt drive or direct drive on it. Now seeing this, I don't think you need a Technic (top of the line), and could probably settle for something far far less expensive. Check out http://www.audio-depot.com, they have a decent variety.

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[NoahPhex]

I have a AIWA px-e855. I recently got into vinyl (I'm into the punk/hardcore thing, and a lot of bands have 7" records and vinyl-only releases), and my good freind, who is a major audiophile, highly recomended this turntable. I got it from www.soundsfine.com or about $120 (plus free shipping). I consider it a worthwhile investment. If you don't want to play vinyl much, this is also great for recording onto your computer, and making mp3's out of your vinyl, like I do. If you don't have a amp/reciever, this also has a preamp on it, but I prefer to use a amp/reciever myself. I hope this helps.

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[Klaas]

I don't actually know how much they cost, and I think it's more than $200, but the Rega's are good. ie when I read my dad's Audiophile magazine (see above post about golden-eared rich people who swear by vinyl), they say that the Rega turntables are amazingly good for the price (and I think maybe they just can't handle that there's a turntable almost as good as theirs for 1/50th the price).

And I wouldn't listen to the people who are urging you to get a Technics 1200 and warning you against belt drive. It might suck when a belt breaks, but there are no high-end direct drive turntables, because direct drive is noisy. And the 1200 is a great table, if you're a DJ, but otherwise it's just a pretty good table, and probably has a heavier arm than you want (the heavier the arm, the quicker your records die).

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[twinpot]

Well, you could go for a decent second hand one, and invest in a decent cartridge. Or, go for a Dual. There is also a Czech turntable, whose name escapes me at the moment, but that is a very good entry level model. They sounds great, and a lot better than some better known marques.

Most deck aimed at audio-philes are belt drive.

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[twinpot]

Maybe a DJ would agree (I don't really know), but an audio geek would have you burnt at the stake for blasphemy ;-)

Audio-phile decks almost exclusively use belts, and do not include speed correctors; they are full manual, and some even have clamps to hold the LP. Oh, and higher up the range, you'll need a fork-lift to carry it.

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[MillMan]

If you want to get a good turntable, you have to pay up around 500 dollars, for a deck like the technics 1200. This is the deck that almost all DJ's use. It is driven by magnets instead of a belt. It looks cool as hell too.

I have a cheap 120 dollar sony turntable. I bought it about 2 years ago and it works great. I use it for my small collection of techno that I have on vinyl. To me it sounds almost as good as my cd's. I got it at best buy as well, most larger electronics stores actually still keep 1 or 2 models in stock.

Basically you're looking at spending about 90 - 140 dollars for my cheap turntable which works well enough, or you have to spend at least 400 dollars to get a good DJ style turntable. There are also "audiophile" type decks for up to 10k, but you wouldn't want those....I think its funny that they even exist :)

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[Benley]

There are several "turntables" for less than $200 to be found, but I wouldn't go so far as to call them "decent"... I tried a couple of inexpensive turntables after my old Dual table died on me, and listening to them made me sick!

Repeat after me: Do not buy a belt-drive turntable. Do not buy a belt-drive turntable. Do not buy a belt-drive turntable.

Your ears will thank you, and the player will last MUCH longer.

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[cei]

Try $500. Something in the Technics 1200 line (around $480 from places like www.jandr.com). They're direct drive (no belts to stretch) with variable speed for pitch correction. I wouldn't use anything else.
------
WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann??

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ?

[swordgeek]

Wander into a high-end audio store (the ones that have $$$$$ vacuum tube monoblocks!) and tell 'em you're looking for a low end turntable. They'll probably point you in the direction of a Rega or the likes. (lovely tables)

LP versus CD

[mosch]

I found one of you vinyl snobs among my coworkers and I did a test. The test was 'can you tell the difference between vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D and vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D , piped through an Apogee PSX-100 and written out digitall onto tape on a Tascam DA-38'. The answer was that no, they couldn't. Which leads me to believe that my idea is right, that people who like vinyl, don't like vinyl. They like the warm, distorted sound that vinyl afficianados seem to adore. I admit though, I cheated a bit, and did do the digital recording at 24/96. Tube amps? They add tons of distortion... it just happens to be pleasing distortion. My personal opinion is that if the artist wanted the vinyl sound, they would've made a final pass after mastering which would consist solely of playing a vinyl version of the mastered record and recording it digitally.
----------------------------

LP versus CD

[mosch]

I found one of you vinyl snobs among my coworkers and I did a test. The test was 'can you tell the difference between vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D and vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D , piped through an Apogee PSX-100 and written out digitall onto tape on a Tascam DA-38'.

The answer was that no, they couldn't. Which leads me to believe that my idea is right, that people who like vinyl, don't like vinyl. They like the warm, distorted sound that vinyl afficianados seem to adore. I admit though, I cheated a bit, and did do the digital recording at 24/96. And I'll also give you that a $500 turntable isn't exactly comparable to the digital side of my setup.

Tube amps? Records? They add tons of distortion... it just happens to be pleasing distortion. My personal opinion is that if the artist wanted the vinyl sound, they would've made a final pass after mastering which would consist solely of playing a vinyl version of the mastered record and recording it digitally.

(sorry about the double post. should've previewed)
----------------------------

Er...

[Wakko Warner]

...sure, once you can figure out a way to scratch on something that won't let you touch the vinyl.

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Audiophile 'high end' tables use belts.

[Wakko Warner]

Reduces the rumble. Direct-drive tables (yes, this includes the 1200s, of which I have a pair and would not trade for anything) introduce a lot of rumble and low-frequency noise. Expensive belt-drive decks (which are usually heavy as hell and take an awful long time to spin up) have little to no rumble problems, leading to a cleaner sound. The SL-1200 is definitely not an audiophile deck. But that's not what it's made for.

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

It's been done before.

[farrellj]

I believe Bang & Olafson (sp?) had one in the mid to late '80s.

It is nice tech for people who have archives of old records, like Canada's CBC radio archives, and the US's Smithsonian (sp?). As well, some older bands that have wanted to put our CDs of their material have sometimes found that their original masters are either missing, or have deteriorated too much from time/improper storage etc. A facinating story is that of the Canadian Band, FM. Their masters had gone missing and they had to remaster from a virgin vinyl copy of their first album, Black Noise. Luckily, CBC, the label they were on had a nifty piece of technolgy called "No Noise" , that will digitally edit out unwanted noise. It's funny that there are two of these units in Canada, one owned by the CBC with their vast archives of recordings, and the RCMP.

FM did a test pressing of the remasterd CD, and one of the members brought it over to his friends house to try out. This guy was a big time audiophile. Had speakers suspended from the ceiling and everything. In between the cuts, the band member noticed that the woofers of the speakers were going in and out between the tracks, audio wise imperceptable, but quite dramatic with the woofers. He was horrified, they might have goofed up the No Noise session! He asked his audiophile friend what he thought it might be...his friend something to the effect that if they hadn't been playing a CD, he might have though it was turntable rumble!

You can now get the CD in Canada, and order it elsewhere. Without the turntable rumble.

ttyl
Farrell
Lo-Grade Audiphile
Fan of the band FM

Actually, this is a common oversight.

[Chris Johnson]

People always focus on the tiny detail, as if the important thing with analog was to retrieve detail that is below the digital noise floor. This is a losing game. Analog noise ends up being just as bad.

What _isn't_ usually noticed (surprisingly) is the more logical purpose for those huge cables and absurd slew rates and amperage levels- the _big_ transients. Get a whole horn section to raise the hairs on the back of your neck with a FFF line- or for that matter get the whole orchestra going, or for that matter early Who, with those incredibly strong saturated compressed vocals (very 'tubey' sounding) and LOUD guitars and LOUD drums. You'll have loads of transients stuffed into the music that go way beyond what you can pack into 'polite' digital playback at 44.1/16, especially when the digital equipment designers continue screwing it up by anally plastering HF-rolloff capacitors all over everything to eat the tiny negligible hiss that the transistors and analog opamps produce.

When put onto a record, these naturally stress the cutting lathe, but that's why cutting lathes went from 100 to 500 to kilowatt amplifiers that fed off 440 volt lines etc ad nauseam. When placed on a record surface, these are not tiny dustlike details that get scrubbed off with the first play. They are fscking big walls of material that tend to fling the needle physically into the next groove and cause skips. When they don't, you get vinyl playback that has the kind of energy and aggression and life that LPophiles talk about.

A realworld example sure to appeal to CmdrTaco's heart: The Who's album Live At Leeds was released with a label that said in big scrawly letters, "CRACKLING NOISES OK- DO NOT CORRECT". When played on a high end turntable, do you in fact get crackly noises? No, you get the Who, live. It's the same as orchestral recordings breaking up at FFF and fancy cartridges that don't break up at those modulation levels.

Obviously, no matter how abused the LPs get, you continue to have those energy peaks undiminished. They outlast all the other sounds, and they are exactly what you don't get with current digital media- hence the audiophiles. This provides us sound engineer types a very interesting and exciting challenge. How do we translate this into the digital domain? I've found that multiband compression and physically modifiying the digital recorders to be the best bet. In particular, it's impossible to both get most of the energy and also suppress all the noise of the analog parts. You have to treat the circuits as if they were high end analog circuits even if the opamps are kind of cheap, and get rid of 'total hiss elimination' caps. Often this gives you the proper presentation, and in the cases where things become too bright and edgy, inductive resistance (easily got by those digital noise filters- ferrite chokes, in other words) is a hell of a lot better for the sound than ringy little ceramic chips to ground.

Re:Actually, this is a common oversight.

[Chris Johnson]

Not exactly. The difference is in the recording technology itself- 44.1/16 is simply not adequate though it _is_ possible to do heavy postprocessing to synthesize what the wave might have been- this is what kilobuck D/A converters like the Wadia do, and can make quite a difference.

The difference is _also_ in the pre/post stages, for instance it doesn't matter how nice your data is if you just run it through J. Random Op-Amp. It's very very common to find extremely crap parts in these supposedly perfect digital devices, and this limits them unfairly. Rotten cheap little op-amps, pathetic coupling caps to save costs- I've bought a _recording_ deck of fairly high end pretensions, an Alesis LX-20 ADAT, and while it does 24 bit recording, and while digital is in theory quite capable of dealing with bass _very_ nicely indeed, this recorder nevertheless has pathetic 47uf coupling caps on the channel outs. This says that they designed to be 3db down at maybe 30hz- they designed out the capacity for clean accurate subsonic information that digital HAS. I'll be rewiring it, probably with 100uf which will at least take the low end down closer to 10hz or so. This will also clean up boominess in the low bass, as when you near such a cutoff you end up getting a certain amount of accentuation- a unit with 47uf cutoffs might 'thunder' pretty impressively but lowering the cutoff frequency produces a cleaner and more responsive sound in those frequency ranges, less muddy. Translates in sonic terms to a touch less sub-bass but going deeper, bass that is markedly clearer and less prone to get in the way of other musical information.

So essentially it's _both_. Yes, digital audio at CD levels is substantially lacking, but on the other hand most of the equipment makes it sound even worse than it is. I'm a rock guy, not really a classical music person, and I know that I've been able to get rid of a _lot_ of the 'polite, sterile, thin' qualities of digital audio by just treating the players and recorders like they were instruments, and tweaking things like the highs. To some extent you really can give the hardware itself more life and energy by letting the digital outputs come through the analog opamps and circuitry as unimpeded as possible. This does also include allowing the noise floor to have normal op-amp noise, transistor hiss. It's not even intrusive, but attempts to completely obliterate this normal circuit noise inevitably also take a major toll on the music.

Re:Actually, this is a common oversight.

[sec]

OK, this is interesting. Basically, you've stated that the difference isn't in the recording technology itself, but rather in the pre- and post-recording stages which surround the recording itself.

Re:Actually, this is a common oversight.

[lukpac]

A realworld example sure to appeal to CmdrTaco's heart: The Who's album Live At Leeds was released with a label that said in big scrawly letters, "CRACKLING NOISES OK- DO NOT CORRECT". When played on a high end turntable, do you in fact get crackly noises? No, you get the Who, live. It's the same as orchestral recordings breaking up at FFF and fancy cartridges that don't break up at those modulation levels.

Eh...the "crackling noises" were due to faulty cables at the original concert and are on the master tapes. Please explain how playing the album on a high end turntable could somehow remove them...

Audio is not _that_ bandlimited

[Chris Johnson]

Honestly, what a silly notion.

You start running into _serious_ problems when you treat the band as strictly what the human ear can pick up. Apart from the fact that subsonics are picked up by the inner ear and supersonics can be sensed though not heard through bone conduction, the trouble is that you get cancellation effects and distortions depending on how you roll off the extremes of the band. This is a nightmarish problem for CD audio, as it must put a _really_ steep filter above 22K if not still lower- a brick wall filter that is about as bad as you can get for causing interactions with lower frequencies. Personally, I prefer to start rolling off a lot lower but a lot more smoothly, but that's just me.

As for the sawtooth, I'm afraid that's the reality. Look, if you take the input signal a bit higher, you start getting a subharmonic through the sampling which can be almost as loud as the sampled frequency! You surely are not suggesting that nearly 100% additive distortion is perfect reconstruction? Try sampling a 44.09 wave at 44.1, obviously you get nothing but the subharmonic. Now try sampling a _22.045_ wave, which technically is supposed to be within the band. Begin to see the problem? The same subharmonic distortions are still affecting you, even within the band. For fun, consider how this affects (less and less) frequencies at 11.0225, 5.51125, and 2.755625K. Each time you're basically halving the distortion- so the interference goes from about 100% at 44.09K to 50% to 25% to 12.5% to 6.25% interference at 2.755625K. But wait, a tone at 2K should be perfect! No, more like a tone at _2.75625K_ (note 756 instead of 7556) will be entirely free of subharmonic distortion sampled at 44.1K, and a tone at 2.755625 is a pathological worst case for that sampling rate w.r.t subharmonic distortions. So be sure not to let your musicians play that frequency ;)

If you think I'm making this up you should study harder. _Everything_ has its limits, and digital recording is interesting because with it, you can really rigorously quantify exactly what and where the limits are. The ones who told you it was perfect reconstruction were not scientists, they were corporate marketers attempting to replace the LP in popular media with the CD. Sure worked, didn't it? Even got many people believing the mathematically, provably wrong claims of no distortion. To me, _SIX!_ percent subharmonic interference in a pathological worst case frequency at a mere 2K or so is pretty damn distorted, frankly. Don't know about you. Maybe I just try harder to overcome this stuff rather than wishing it away...

Re:Audio is not _that_ bandlimited

[sec]

The ones who told you it was perfect reconstruction were not scientists, they were corporate marketers attempting to replace the LP in popular media with the CD. Sure worked, didn't it? Even got many people believing the mathematically, provably wrong claims of no distortion.

Kindly refrain from constructing straw men. I don't recall anyone ever saying that there was no distortion in practical applications -- just that the distortion was much less than was possible with comparable analog systems. If you think that this isn't the case, then kindly provide some proof.

BTW, the claim of no distortion is provably correct, but only assuming a bunch of ideal conditions that never occur in the real world.

Re:Audio is not _that_ bandlimited

[svirre]

You start running into _serious_ problems when you treat the band as strictly what the human ear can pick up. Apart from the fact that subsonics are picked up by the inner ear and supersonics can be sensed though not heard through bone conduction, the trouble is that you get cancellation effects and distortions depending on how you roll off the extremes of the band. This is a nightmarish problem for CD audio, as it must put a _really_ steep filter above 22K if not still lower- a brick wall filter that is about as bad as you can get for causing interactions with lower frequencies. Personally, I prefer to start rolling off a lot lower but a lot more smoothly, but that's just me.

In modern oversampling DA converters this is done in the digital domain where one can make a very well behaved filter. AD konversion on the studio side typically uses a higher resolution which is downsampled to 16 bit also digitally.

As for the sawtooth, I'm afraid that's the reality. Look, if you take the input signal a bit higher, you start getting a subharmonic through the sampling which can be almost as loud as the sampled frequency!

Now there is no such thing as 'subharmonic distortion' usually this term is incorrectly used for intermodulation distortion or aliasing. In this case you seem to refer to the latter. Obviously if one doesn't filter out frequency components over the f/2 limit one will suffer from distortion. At 22.045 KHz the antialiasingfilter, be it digital or analogue, should have reduced the input level to below the quantification noise limits (or sufficiently close).

Why you imply that aliasing distortion should affect frequency components below f/2 are however beyond me. While it's correct that to achieve perfect DA decoding require infinite computing power, we can approach perfection sufficiently that it's not reasonable to think we can hear the difference.

You seem to think that only a tone whose frequency goes an integer amount into fs can be correctly decoded. This is _not_ the case neither in theory nor in RL. I suggest a closer examination of the universal sampling theorem.

Correct decoding will look at more than the sample ta T=t to determine et correct momentary value, preceeding and following samples will also be used.

Re:Audio is not _that_ bandlimited

[CausticPuppy]

Thank you!
I was about to spend a couple hours doing research to back up my claims which I simply and "intuitively" knew to be true.
The engineers are correct in that you don't lose any INFORMATION in a signal if you sample at at least twice its frequency. However, that doesn't account for the, uh, "extra" information that's added. When transmitting data across a wire, you don't really need to worry about subharmonic distortion. But as I said in another post... there's more to reproducing the original sound than signal theory suggests.
I take it you're a musician?

These aren't new. Or that useful, really.

[Holgate]

Turntables with laser "styli" have been around for at least ten years. (And we're not talking about CD players here.) But they've never caught on, and not just because of the price.

The reason? Simple: while a contact stylus does produce gradual, minimal wear on the vinyl, it also does a great job of shifting dust, hairs and other crap out of the grooves, without the need for ridiculously expensive vacuum cleaners to blow it out of the way.

Go retro. You can find high quality turntables really cheaply these days in junk shops. And if your vinyl's of decent quality (the disc, not its contents), you won't notice the wear anyway.

Isn't the wavelength of light too long for this?

[Paul Crowley]

Hang on. A 12in record has a couple of inches inside for the label, so let's say 5in ~= 120mm radius of playable vinyl. One side might play for, say, 25 mins; at 33 1/3 RPM that means about 800 grooves have to fit in that space, so each groove is about 0.15 mm wide. Clearly the groove can't wiggle by more than 0.15 mm, and probably much less - let's be generous and say 100 um (microns). Reading that with, say, 100nm light, you get a resolution of 100 um /100nm = 1000 - ie you can distinguish 1000 different displacements. That doesn't compare well to the resolution of a CD player - 65,536 possible displacements.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, and my math may be screwy - but this doesn't check out on my calculator...
--

Don't trust

[bjk4]

I wouldn't mark this as a very good purchase. We now have CD players (lasers included) for about $30. Not $30k. I can appreciate the cost of compact lasers 10 years ago, but things have changed and things are cheaper now. I think the company should consider modernizing its lineup before charging such outrageous prices.

Besides, it looks like a late 80s product (I'm thinking USR plastic type.) If it looked and acted like one of those uber-cool minidisc players, then I'd be interested.

-B

Re:Don't trust

[Mister Attack]

We now have CD players (lasers included) for about $30.

I think you miss the point. Vinyl, IMHO, gives a much better, smoother, richer sound than does digital. CD's are great and all, but they really can't compare to the sound of a well-mastered vinyl record played on a top-quality turntable. The whole reason CDs are more popular than vinyl is that a cheap CD player sounds 10 times better than a cheap record player. But a really excellent record player sounds at least 10 times better than a really excellent CD player. It's a tradeoff. I, for one, would definitely buy one of these if I had the extra $30k lying around. Maybe Hemos wants to buy one for me? come on Hemos, support a starving college student:)!

As for your point about the cost of compact lasers, it's well taken, but the cost of this unit is most likely _not_ in the lasers. There's a whole load of signal processing equipment that's required to turn the (I'm assuming) Doppler shift detected in the reflected light into sound.

In short: Yes, you could buy a CD player that will give you decent sound for $30. But keep in mind that you won't even come _close_ to the quality of a really, really good record player. And if this unit is all they promised, which seems reasonable, then the cost of a really, really good record player just dropped by an order of magnitude.
--

Not really...

[YuppieScum]

It actually looks like it's been around for ages...

The copyright notice on the bottom of the FAQ is dated 1997, and one of testimonials says

<I>"The after-sales service of ELP is perfect. Although I had a failure on LT in 1990, I am fully satisfied with the LT."</I>

Maybe they just need to hire a better publicity manager...

Dr. Evil would *LOVE* this!

[Black Art]

Just the thing to play Alan Parson Project albums on!

Bwahahaha!

CowboyNeal Trance Fan?

[Mithrandir]

I spot a trance fan in CowboyNeal. Completely useless information follows...

One of the earliest and most successful underground tracks was called Two Full Moons and a Trout released on Platipus records under the artist title of Art of Trance (I think that's right, or it might be Terra Firma). Wicked track. Anyway, just happy to see another raver in the /. crew.

Is there an icon for RETRO topics?

[Morgaine]

The lego one doesn't hint at the subject matter at all.

Or perhaps a music or hifi or A/V icon would be more appropriate, ie. to avoid offending those who don't think vinyl is a retro topic, particularly scratching DJs.

Turntables for archival reproduction

[Morgaine]

That's a good point which I hadn't considered before. Yes, there must be quite a few such uses for turntables yet.

However, the MAJOR use of new turntables (by numbers sold) is still by DJs, whether you like them or not. :-)

Re:Turntables for archival reproduction

[Morgaine]

You may be right, but as none of the people that I know with top-end audiophile systems rate their turntables anymore, I extrapolated that it was a rare affliction. Maybe my acquaintances aren't typical. Maybe yours aren't. Who knows?!

Re:Turntables for archival reproduction

[swordgeek]

"However, the MAJOR use of new turntables (by numbers sold) is still by DJs, whether you like them or not. :-)"</i>

<p>Got any numbers to back up that statement? I suspect that if it's true, it would mostly be because DJs tend to go through turntables. I bet that the major use of new turntables by hours used would be to listen to music. Rega and Linn are still selling a lot of tables.

Been around for ages

[Manuka]

This thing has been around for at least a decade. Hardly new.

Re:Audiophiles

[rve]

Maybe it's not the right tool for audiophiles, but I can think of a use for in the studio: you may want to transfer the music on a very old collectable record to CD, perhaps to re-release it, but the original tapes are no longer available, or in a dismal state. In that case this gadget may give a slightly better quality copy than an ordinary record player...

Re:needles and dirt

[unitron]

Phonograph stylii (styluses?) are not for digging dirt out of record grooves. The area of contact between the groove wall and the stylus is so extremely small that a gram or two of tracking force becomes thousands of pounds of pressure and the friction generates enough heat to melt the vinyl in the area of contact which means that a little speck of dust will get "welded" into the groove wall to serve as a "click" or "pop" forever thereafter.

Re:CED Laserdisk would've been a kick ass audio fm

[unitron]

I believe that the system to which you refer used a "needle" (stylus) and groove only as a means of guiding the "tonearm" across the disc, but the signal was detected by the change in capacitance (to put it roughly, the change in the distance between two conductors--that distance being filled by an insulator, in this case, air)between the disc and the "pickup". This meant no actual contact, and therefore no wear and tear, on the part of the disc containing the information.

Re:Tape, not wire

[unitron]

Actually the Germans were working with tape when the U.S. was still doing wire. Think BASF. The Roberts/Akai reel to reels trace their heritage to German machines captured and brought back to the states by a American officer. It was Bing Crosby's huge (for the time)check to Ampex that really got the ball rolling on post-WWII tape recording, though.

Re:Top 5% of old stories

[Ed Avis]

I believe such a system has been tried before, marketed on the grounds of less wear and tear as well as sound quality. IIRC the problem is that without a needle making physical contact, there is no way to get dirt out of the grooves of your record.

Big Bucks and No Brains

[A nonymous Coward]

Many years ago I stumbled across a magazine called (I think) High End. Amazing fun. People who built $250,000 listening rooms, people who would not even have light dimmers in their house because someone might use it and disrupt their listening pleasure, mono tube amps and vinyl players only (no radio; no CDs; not even tape, IIRC), people who bitched because they couldn't get Con Edison to give them two transformers at the power pole.

In other words, people with way more money than brains.

Basically they claim to have golden ears which are not satisfied with any recordings except live to master to vinyl. These idiots spent tens of thousands of dollars just for a stylus, not to mention more tens of thousands for the tone arm and huge block of granite for a base.

I might allow that the very first listening of a vinyl record might seem better than a CD, but not the 2nd or subsequent ones. So that's why the laser turntable -- no mechanical wear.

But this only applies if there's no dust on the vinyl, which explains the emphasis on its vacuum cleaner. I doubt that's really good enough. I often wondered, reading those couple of High End issues, how much it would have cost these suckers to build a clean room for their collection, with rubber gloves to access the vinyl and place it on the turntable.

--

Big ears with nothing between

[A nonymous Coward]

I don't doubt you can hear a difference. But you do not hear The One And Only True Sound. I do not believe that the mechanical mastering and playback process is that good. I do not believe you can hear .004% distortion or whatever the figures are for current amps. And I do not believe that the speakers are so good that the amp distortion is even discernible. If there really were such a thing as The One And Only True Sound, there would be only One True Speaker.

What I sneer at is idiots who waste money on concrete bunkers, separate pole transformers, etc, when the wear of each playback makes the next one worse, and when all that money could have gone into a filtered container for all that vinyl, so it would sound better the tenth time than the dirty one sounds the second time. I suppose the ultimate is to record direct to vinyl (could you get even a hundred copies for each recording?) and one playback, then toss it out and buy another. When you get to that level, you'd be better off hiring the artists in the first place and skip the damned one-shot recording. Is there any point in having a playback room of better quality than the recording studio, or the concert hall?

The point of a recording is to get a wider audience, in both time and space. A recording which is only good for one playback because the playback wears it out is pretty useless in my book.

--

Re:Big ears with nothing between

[A nonymous Coward]

Check all your facts again, starting with being an AC. I ain't. Read carefully. Then read what I said in the message again. Carefully. You do NOT hear the One True Sound just because you play vinyl. You simply hear The Vinyl Sound, modified by the recording setup, modified by your playback setup. It is NOT the One True Sound. Only the original performance is The One True Sound.

A recording is meant to distribute the sound in time and space, so more people can hear a performance, and hear it when they want, and more than once. Vinyl wears out. The closest vinyl will get to The One True Sound is the first playback, and then only a direct to disk with limited copies. Your second playback will not sound as good as the first. And if this is how you want to listen to a performance, and you have the bucks, then you also have the bucks to simply hire the artist for a live performance.

Any playback, vinyl or CD, goes thru so many imperfect steps, and depends on speakers which don't even come close to The One True Sound, that if you like fancy schmancy playback methods, it's because you like that sound, NOT because that sound is closer to The One True Sound.

--

Re:Big ears with nothing between

[letchhausen]

There you go again with your half-assed judgements about what others can or can't do. Why are those who choose certain paths idiots? I suppose you know the one true and only way?

Since many CD's sound so shitty to begin I guess you never get even one play out of them. I would say that LP's are good for a lot more than one play. The sonic difference between one and many plays still provides a warmth and immediacy that most CD's just don't have, though they are getting there.

As I pointed out before there's lots of records that are not going to make it to CD. How is digital going to help that get to a wider audience?

What I sneer at is people who judge others as idiots when it's so apparent they themselves are clueless.

One other thing, since the playback room is not a recording studio (nor a concert hall), and since we live in a time when music is mostly enjoyed in the home, then it makes sense that for your listening session that you would want the best experience possible. One is only limited in what one can afford. Different priorities for different folks. It makes more sense to me to spend a jillion bucks on a listening room than to collect vintage cars. But I would never jeer at those who do.

You would, but then you post as an anonymous coward.

Top 5% of old stories

[jim68000]

The Point award sent me scurrying to the bottom of the page: copyright 1997. Oh well.

Great turntable... for a bubble boy

[DeathB]

This type of turntable has been around for a while now... The one thing that they all seem to have in common, is that to get any sort of reasonable sound out of them, you have to keep a vaccum cleaner riding ahead of the cartridge. One of the great things a needle has always done, is to push any lightweight crud out of the groove, anything you miss with the cleaner you will hear. You might be able to fix this with a DSP, but considering that there is no AD conversion in the current system, this would also not seem to be a great idea.

I saw a review of these once that summed it up like this, if you've kept your LP's in a cleanroom all of their life, and never used anything but a laser on them, they might be in good enough condition... Then again, they still might not.

Re:Big bucks

[mpk]

If you're an archive, a radio station, or whatever and you have hundreds of thousands of pieces of vinyl, the vast majority of which have never been and most likely will never be released on vinyl, you want to make sure they stay in good working order so they're still useful in the future.
If somebody requests an item from your archive, the options are either to use a conventional stylus-based turntable for transcription, which will add some wear (not much, but it adds up) to the record, or use one of these gizmos, which won't cause wear. You can then dump it to DAT, Minidisc, or whatever, for the end user.
And as to the cost - the CD player cost millions to develop, but is now cheap through mass production and high volume sales. These turntables will have also cost a lot to develop, but as the market is so much smaller, the unit cost to recoup your investment has to be higher. Remember, these are high-end turntables, not the gramophonic equivalent of a £70 Discman. And high-end kit is always expensive.

Re:Hang on to your 1200s

[redled]

It's not analogue?

"despite its CD-like design, the ELP is still a 100% analog device as far as the signal path is concerned."

This product is _not_ for Vinyl DJs. It is _not_ for CD DJs. It is _not_ for people who want to digitize thier vinyl collection. It _is_ for people who love to listen to their vinyl, and wish to cause as little wear as possible while doing so. It _is_ for libraries, museums and other historical institutions who wish to preserve a piece of musical history, again without causing damage. In the audiophile community, where many consider their collection of vinyl irreplacable and priceless, the ELP is a bargain.

--

a valuable service

[Ymerej]

I have about 200 vinyl albums, 25 or so of which I'd love to have converted to digital form. Of course I'm not going to buy one of these turntables, but I would pay someone to do a high-quality A-D job on them.

The complaint isn't always "noise"

[asullivan]

Some (ok, several) musicians complain about digital not because it introduces noise -- mere amplification alone can cause enough of this -- but because it's not as "warm". This is one of those terms that is mighty hard to explain in words, but it seems nevertheless to identify something: many musicians I have known can identify "blindly" a digital versus an analogue recording.

Of course, this could reflect alternative aesthetics. After all, some musicians like digital recordings better. The question, I suspect, is really one of what makes sound better. And it does seem obvious that a multiple-laser reading system will necessarily be subject to a DSP. Given that, the lack of "warmth" will show up. Whether this is good or bad, then, is related only to the listener.

Re:The complaint isn't always "noise"

[Molly]

>The "warmness" they are refering to is due to
>the fact that analogue outputs nice rounded
>waves, whereas digital outputs square waves.

Not quite. There are various ways of doing digital to analogue conversion, some of which produce the sort of 'stair-step' output that you describe, and some of which don't. Whatever process is used, the raw output _will_ have edges or discontinuities that weren't in the original signal. For this reason, all DACs use a low pass reconstruction filter on the output, with a cut-off at approximately half the sampling rate. The characteristics of this filter, such as the steepness of the cutoff, and the flatness and phase response in the passband can have a significant effect on the quality of the output signal, but I can assure you that the analogue outputs of your CD player don't have any square edges.

Various different types of DAC (one-bit, multi-bit, oversampling, etc.) have different characteristics that allow different kinds of filter to be used. For example, a one bit DAC with a lot of oversampling pushes the effective sampling frequency right up allowing a very gentle filter to be used, and a filter with a very gentle roll-off tends to have fewer undesirable effects in the passband.

In fact, if you listen to sine and square wave outputs from a function generator, I think you'll find that the sine wave sounds rather thin and 'cold' whereas the square wave will sound 'warmer'. This is because the sine wave is a single frequency, f, whereas the square wave also contains components at 3*f, 5*f, etc., which tend to be quite musical, and 'nice' sounding.

Winsk, in his/her reply to your posting, talks about clipping and distortion. Solid state amplifiers can actually manage 'warm' and 'analogue' pretty well, and cannot be held entirely to blame for the 'cold' sound of digital. When clipping does occur, valves tend to generate odd harmonics (like 1/3 and 1/5) which sound quite musical and 'good', whereas transistors generate even, and higher order odd harmonics which sound less 'good'. Under normal operating conditions transistors should not be generating significant amounts of distortion of this type anyway, whereas valves distort slightly thoughout their operating range, giving rise to the 'warming effect' of valve amplifiers.

I am unable to explain why digital signals sound 'cold'. Early digital recording and reproduction systems had a reputation for a harsh and overly bright sound, but modern systems are considerably smoother. I suspect it is that digital sound is not subject to the same colourations and distortions as signals coming of tape or vinyl, and for whatever reason, we find those imperfections pleasing to the ear.

Don't forget that any recording, digital or analogue, is nothing like it would sound if the performer was there in the room with you. The difference between digital and analogue sound is miniscule in comparison.

Molly.

Re:The complaint isn't always "noise"

[Vernando]

This is one of those terms that is mighty hard to explain in words

Its not at all hard to explain in words. The "warmness" they are refering to is due to the fact that analogue outputs nice rounded waves, whereas digital outputs square waves. Its the same reason stereo systems are comming out with valves rather than transistors - this helps compensate for a digital input, by rounding it off, or preserves a nice analogue input.

The only down side to vinyl is that the needle tends to degrade the material each time it's played, which is where lasers come into it...

Re:The complaint isn't always "noise"

[winsk]

Digital equipment does not simply "output square waves". Perhaps you are referring to solid state (transistor) amplifiers which will clip a wave harshly if they are driven too hard, eventually resulting in an almost square wave. The warmth associated with a tube amplifier is due to its more pleasing clipping characteristics. I agree that tube amps can warm up a sterile digital input, but not because the digital signal is some kind of square wave..

Re:But what about the DJs?

[mcc]

actually, you can make music by "scratching" CDs.. just not the way you meant. Try to find something by Oval to listen to-- most of their music is really cool ambient created by engineering CD player errors (skipping, scratches in the cd created by hand.. i read something somewhere that said they've actually used _painted_ CDs at times)..

God is a DJ.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[freq]

> because I'm into ALOT of the funky soul jazz
> from the 60's and 70's, much of which is very
> obscure and they'll never release the albums
> onto CD

if you aren't already hipped to it, check out www.dustygroove.com to feed your 60's 70's soul jazz bossa dub reggae funk habit :) its amazing the number of classic records that are being reissued on VINYL these days!

-freq

Re:Fuck the DJs and the horse they rode in on!!!

[freq]

YEAH! fuck the DJS! they could use a little action every once in a while...

And im real sorry, but most turntables ARE aimed at djs. I can think of roughly 10 models off the top of my head which are aimed at djs... including the venerable Technics SL-1200-MK2, and kids are buying boatloads of them! I know alot more people who own turntables than portable mp3 players actually :)

and wether you are a stuck up old audiophile who can afford a 30k turntable or a 14 year old with some beat up geminis and a couple cheezy hiphop battle records, vinyl is A BEAUTIFUL THING. and regardless of the "original primary purpose" of the turntable, some kids are doing some really interesting things with them these days besides just playing music.

VINYL IS BEAUTIFUL! and given the choice between a future with vinyl and a future with dvd audio, well i think its an easy decision :)

--freq--

to paraphrase from Third Rock

[Zugok]

and I really dig this one...Dick Solomon says something to the effect of

'Cds? Ha! When will these silly human realise the superiority of vinyl!'

Re:Muy Nifty!

[Mr. Piccolo]

Just search Freshmeat for TerminatorX. Same type of thing.

There's turntables MORE expensive?

[Knile]

"It outperforms many turntables 2 or 3 times its price" -- Dr. CP Yu.(www.elpj.com/welcome.html)

OK, so this guy claims he knows of turntables out there that cost >US$27,000? Wow... I think it'd be a rare audiophile who threw out cash for one of those. He also claims that it makes CDs "unlistenable." Oh really? Hmm... seems to me that even a clean vinyl record (played with a laser) would sound worse than a dirty CD. Remember that a CD has a protective coating on it, and it's impossible to keep those records PERFECTLY clean.

Nice concept though, and awfully weird how it follows my dream last night of listening to my record collection.

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[sec]

However, those who are willing to put up with the extra work, and spend a lot of money for good equipment, end up with a sound you don't find on CD.

I beg to differ. I suspect that you only _think_ that you have better sound quality.

Do you remember back in the late 80's/early 90's when people swore that colouring the edge of a CD with a green marker improved the sound quality? I think the same thing is at work here.

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[sec]

Actually, any recording method, be it analog or digital, will lose some of the information in the original signal, and distort some of the remaining information. I think the thing is that LP fans actually like the sound of the distortion introduced into the signal.

Considering that compressing a digital audio signal with an MP3 encoder will discard about 90% of the information in the original signal while only having a slight impact on sound quality, you can see that the minute amount of information lost in the quantization process shouldn't amount to a hill of beans.

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[FunkMasta2000]

For the most part, you're probably right. But because cd's only contain sound recorded at 41,000Hz (or is it 48k?), they lose some very minute amount of information. Where as vinyl, being analog, has no gaps whatsoever. Is the difference descernable to the human ear? I doubt it.

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[raibeart]

Of course if money is no object. I'd just prefer to have the London Philharmonic come to my living room for an evening of fine listening enjoyment.

Less trouble... But lot's more money.

Of course when you want to listen to the music of dead artists... Gonna have to shill out that quarter mil.

:>

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[bilenkey]

Rockport Capella sells for around $60.000 I belive. Go get some stereophile and see for yourself how can you spend 1/2 mil on a hi-fi system.

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[Mr Windows]

Most regular guys use something in the $3000-6000 range

Well, I'm just a `regular guy' (I'm sure that some girls listen to records too...), and my turntable was bought before I was born, and maybe even in (UK) shillings, :) Certainly less than $3000, anyway; more like 100 ukp (which was quite a large chunk of cash in the 1970s)

FWIW, it's a Technics [something], and still performs perfectly, though I've replaced the needle a couple of times (as expected, and easier than replacing the laser on a CD player :), and bought a new drive belt last year.

Sigh for proper vinyl; there's nothing quite the same, for some unquantifiable reason.

The good Dr Yu recommends ``double wet and vacuum cleaning using carbon fiber record brush, after initial cleaning using the vacuum cleaner'', which sounds like an awful lot of hassle to me, and probably doesn't do much for the lifespan of the records.

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[swordgeek]

Maybe not $3k, but I've got a lovely little Rega Planar 3 that I picked up for a song. The rest of my system can't hold up to it, so until I get a new preamp, amp, and speakers, the turntable keeps me happy.

Re:There's turntables MORE expensive?

[vinyl1]

Yeah, there are. I could mention the Rockport Sirius and the Fossell Air Force One.

It's true this thing is old. The original owner of the idea couldn't get it to work, and sold it to some Japanese guys. They can't get it to work either. The two problems: warped records, and little pieces of dust. On a regular table, slight warps are no problem, and pieces of loose dust are simply pushed aside by the stylus.

Actually, all the superexpensive products have more problems than they're worth. Most regular guys use something in the $3000-6000 range, such as a Linn, a VPI, or a Basis. They're regular commercial products that sell in reasonable numbers, and work well.

I suppose I'm the only Slashdotter with a $3000 turntable. Oh, well...

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[mindstrm]

Actually, not at all..
There is not necessarily any need to go digital.

Remember Video Disc? those big 2 sided suckers? They were read with a laser... and were completely analog (digital audio tracks did come later, and are now standard). The video was all analog....
it was via modulated beam.

There is no reason an analog circuit cannot be built do accomplish whatever a DSP can accomplish; it's just simpler and more flexible to use a DSP.

For $13500...

[NoahPhex]

You would think they would use something better than a belt-drive turntable, which wear out over time. High-end turntables use direct drive, which is far better and is also noticible in the playback of vinyl. Also, here's a snippet from their specs page: Reproductionable Record type
12"(30cm)/10"(25cm)/7"(17cm) Black Record - This might mean that it can only play black vinyl. While most records are black, I have many splatter and colored vinyl records in my collection. Also, many many records (mostly from Europe) were pressed useing colored vinyl. This may or might not be the best turntable if your looking to play rare vinyl, especially if it's colored, etc.

Re:For $13500...

[twinpot]

I have not seen a high end AUDIO-PHILE (as opposed to DJ) turntable use direct drive. Some of the mega expensive ones are as much art pieces as they are LP players.

Re:For $13500...

[youbiquitous]

What high-end TTs use direct drive? Only ones I know of are DJ TTs, which have to spin up as fast as possible. Most high-end TTs are belt driven to isolate the motor rumble from the platter.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[sec]

Did I say consumer-level? I was speaking on principle. Let's see... a near perfect analog system would consist of 1) somebody playing an acoustic instrument, and 2) a human ear. Better SNR than 16-bit quantization, and the only noise in the system is going to be due to bloodflow in the ear (ok, maybe dogs and traffic if you're not in a sound room). Anything else processing the sound in between, digital or analog, is just going to add noise.

Tell me, in the scenario you listed above, what would the point be of putting any digital component into the system? The main reasons for digitizing an audio signal are:

1) Storing it for later playback
2) Transmitting it greater distances than it will carry naturally
3) Applying special effects to it

If you're not going to do any of these things to the signal, a digital system is totally pointless anyway, so there's no point in comparing them.

Nyquist's theorem is useful for data transmission. If it is applied to audio, then there's really no reason that a classical music CD should sound worse than actually being there, even when played on the best hardware. But then we'd be getting into psychoacoustics.

Indeed.

There are plenty of other weak points in the channel, though. Microphones, amplifiers, speakers... These all add their own bits of distortion into the signal.

Correct me on this if I'm wrong (but do it nicely). If the original sound source has two signal components of 60kHz and 65kHz, there will be a tertiary tone of 5kHz as a result of the other two being superimposed. Is that 5kHz tone sampled successfully with a 44.1kHz sampling rate?

Consider the opposite question. 60-65kHz is outside the range of any consumer-quality analog recording equipment. (Maybe some professional quality equipment can do it, but then, you can trivially expand the range of a digital system by increasing the sampling rate and sample size, too.)

So, neither the analog nor the digital system will pick up the fundamental frequencies. That means, then, that either both the digital and the analog system will pick up the 5kHz beat signal, or neither of them will.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[sec]

As the matter of fact, it has become commonplace to oversample the heck out of a signal in the front end of the A/D converter (ie. sample at several times the Nyquist rate), do the anitaliasing filtering with a digital filter (which have much nicer characteristics than analog filters), then downsample the signal to 44.1kHz. This gets around some of the stickier problems associated with sampling.

Interestingly enough, with your 60Hz sine wave example, you got the situation backwards. If you sample a 60Hz triangle wave at 120Hz, playing it back will result in a 60Hz sine wave. The reason? A 60Hz sine wave consists of only a single harmonic -- that is, if you took the Fourier transform of it, you'd end up with a single spike at 60Hz. The 60Hz triangle wave, on the other hand, consists of a fundamental harmonic at 60Hz, and a diminishing series of harmonics at higher frequencies. Since all of these higher harmonics would be lost in the sampling process, you'd end up with only the fundamental harmonic -- a 60Hz sine wave.

Neat, huh?

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[sec]

With 16-bit audio, the best S/N ratio you can hope for is 96db, am I correct? I haven't seen the math behind this, I've just read this in several places as being the theoretical S/N ratio for 16-bit digital audio.

I'm not going to go through the derivation of this -- check out a DSP textbook if you want to know that -- but the formula for the SQNR (Signal to Quantization Noise Ratio) for a digital system is:

SQNR = 6.02B + 1.76 dB

where B is the number of bits per sample.

Therefore, the theoretical maximum SNR for a 16 bit digital system is 98.08 dB. For a 24 bit system, it's 146.24 dB, and for a 32 bit system, it's 194.4 dB.

There are actually upper limits on the SNR of an analog system, too, that result from the effects of thermal noise, but I don't know what they are, off-hand. Also, you never truly have infinite bandwidth.

The thing is, I find that comparing devices that can only exist in theory to be rather pointless.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[sec]

Well yeah, that's assuming your DAC is doing a nice job of reconstructing the sine wave. If you sample any waveform at 120 samples/sec with a fundamental of 60Hz and that only has harmonic overtones (120,180, etc) the output will always be the same. As far as I know, most DAC's don't do this very well at their frequency limit, in which case the output would be more "connect-the-dots" and you'd have a triangle waveform with some slightly rounded-off tips.

Certainly true. I should have prefixed that with 'theoretically'. In practice, no device performs very well near the limits of its range.

Most audio pros work with the digital audio at 96k and then downsample right before the CD master. On the other hand, my SBLive insists on outputting 48khz, which makes that card useless for digital transfers to/from DAT that wind up on CD. I just do everything at 44.1k (on another soundcard) and I'm happy.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. The oversampling I was talking about occurs in the A/D converter, and the end user never sees it. As it turns out, it's easier to sample at a rate so high that aliasing simply won't occur, then use a digital filter for antialiasing, then convert the sample rate down to the user requested sample rate than it is to create an analog filter with the sharp cutoff required for the antialiasing filter.

For example, to get that 96kHz sample rate, the A/D chip might sample at 250kHz or 500kHz, then use an FIR lowpass filter (which can be made with a very sharp cutoff, and, as a bonus, can be made so that they don't mess with the phase of the signal like analog filters do) for antialiasing. Then they might downsample the signal to 96kHz.

All this happens on the A/D converter chip. (Obviously, it has to have a DSP processor -- essentially a special-purpose CPU -- integrated if it's going to do this.) The downsample to 44.1kHz just before the CD mastering stage is an entirely separate step.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[sec]

My question is: what does this have to do with anything? There is no DFT performed in the signal path of a consumer digital audio system. About the only place I can see a DFT being used in a piece of consumer audio equipment is to implement a fancy spectrum analyser on the front panel.

BTW, what exactly do you mean by 50% of the signal? It doesn't seem to have a lot of meaning.

Re:so is it digital or analog? (pedantry)

[ChadN]

Remember that the nyquist rate is greater than 2 times the highest reproduceable signal (not greater than or equal). There are actually an infinite number of 100 Hz sine waveforms that can be reconstructed from a 200Hz sampling frequency (by varying the amplitude and phase) That is just a mathematical pedantry though. Anything less than 100Hz is unique (mathematically; this assumes a perfect filter is used)

The problem w/ consumer digital sound is simply that the sampling rate and SN ratio, while fine on paper, require that the post-D/A filtering be very good. Unrealistically good (Heck, it was very ambitious for the time in which it was designed). But it is very hard to design zero-phase filters with a steep cutoff and low ringing, and I think this is what the audiophiles typically complain about. If the sampling rate had been 100,000Hz and 24-30 bits of quantization, then the filters could have been much more gentle in the high end, the D/A could have been very linear where it counted, and audiophiles who claim to like the "warmth" of analog systems, would be very pleased. Methods like oversampling, etc. are very helpful in this respect, but have their own implementation issues.

I personally think that "warmth" that analog audiophiles often talk about is simply a learned response to the type of gentle noise that good analog systems inherently have. A good digital system is all about reducing or removing noise, since the type of noise it introduces (aliasing typically) is quite unpleasant. But the noise of analog systems has a different and distinctive feel, which many people simply call "warmth". It is still an artifact of playback, though, and not an example of better reproduction of the signal. In other words, gaussian noise is something that people are just trained to accept, and when you mess with it, some people get upset.

Anyway, CDs were a good compromise at the time, for producing decent consumer audio that didn't degrade with plays, and shouldn't really be held as an example of what digital audio is truly capable of. Perhaps, in the future, we will have DVDs with much higher grade audio that WILL show everyone that digital can be both "warm" and accurate. Audiophiles will still want to play them on tube-amps, however. :)

Muy Nifty!

[Kartoffel]

Cool! I know what you mean, Cowboy Neal. A laser never physically touches the vinyl. You could scratch all day long without wearing out the record. :)

One possible bad thing--vinyl records have that wonderful sound partially because of the needle riding in the groove. If you removed that interface it would sound different.

Scratching is fun. Check out this crazy setup that lets you scratch mp3s using a turntable interface.

Re:Big bucks

[garver]

I won't argue that they definitely have a niche product here, but I can think of a few reasons to buy one:

• You have tons of old LPs that haven't been released on CD.
• You are really damned rich and what the difference between $13,000 and $200 doesn't seem that much to you.
• And in a more lucrative vein, buy one of these and start a media transfer service. People bring their old LPs to you, you give them bright shiny Audio CDs. I'm not sure what the legal ramifications are here, but I think media transfer is OK for your own use, especially if the new media format is not available. This is similar to MP3s; makeing an MP3 is not illegal (although the RIAA would like to make it so), it is distributing it that is illegal. (Note, I'm in the US, don't know what other countries are like.)

Nevertheless, this is very cool, old meets new. And I wouldn't be surprised to see vinyl revatalized a bit (only a bit). The high cost of these is probably because they don't expect to sell many. They have to recoup their dev. costs.

Yep: Re:It's been done before.

[Steeldrivin]

I don't recall any specifics, but I definitely remember reading about a laser-based turntable back in the late 80's, when I was reading lots of stereo mags. Didn't pay much attention as I wasn't a vinyl fan.

Probably not related, but I recall a George Michael video (one with lots of soopamodels) where there's a brief shot of a record playing with laser light shining on it. Dunno if that was a laser turntable or just a regular turntable with a separate laser set up to look nifty.

Re:Defeats the purpose of vinyl

[Steeldrivin]

Therefore, reading the grooves of a record with a laser would completely defeat the purpose of vinyl.

Nope. Simply using a laser doesn't mean that it's a digital process.

It's probably like the technique of eavesdropping on a room by bouncing a laserbeam off the window. Sounds cause vibration in the glass, which changes how the laser beam is reflected. Measure the changes in the beam, convert the changes into sound, and voila, you're listening in.

No analog/digital/analog conversion involved.

In the case of a record, they just have to bounce lasers off the sides of the groove. Pick up the reflected laser light, convert the fluctuations in the beams into voltages (an analog process), and feed that signal into an amp.

There may be an analog delay circuit involved, if the lasers aren't pointed at the same place in the groove. Point one slightly ahead and put a slight delay on the signal. This may not be necessary.

Re:Hang on to your 1200s

[Steeldrivin]

Why assume it's for the home market? The price should be a good clue that they're not selling to the home market. They might sell some for home use, but the most likely buyers are businesses and institutions. The few home users will be like the rare person who buys an SGI for home use.

Their page has quotes from the National Library of Canada, a brain surgeon (big $$), a dentist (big $$), and a professional classical musician. These are not Wal-Mart electronics department shoppers.

SNR is not very important.

[Molly]

It's easy to quote signal to noise ratio figures because they're listed in the specs of just about every bit of audio equipment, and the theory is taught in every introductory signal processing course. To me such figures are largely irrelevant. Many modern CD recordings are compressed so hard at the mastering stage that they sound bloody awful, noise or otherwise. (We had loudness wars with 45s too, have we learned nothing?) Those that aren't over-compressed probably don't use all 16 bits very effectively anyway, so the theoretical SNR is not realised. Also, the 96dB figure is the theoretical SNR of the CD medium itself; the 'signal' on that CD probably has a noise component, originating from the equipment used in the studio, and the analogue stages of the player itself.

Some of my favourite records are 45s from the 60s that I bought second hand, and which must have spent more time out of their sleeves than in. There is an abundance of surface noise, scratches, and distortion from mastering. Still, they sound great to me. A great song with noise is still a great song.

When arguing the pros and cons of analogue vs. digital you also have to bear in mind that not all distortion is a bad thing. To illustrate, I can make copies of CDs onto a 20+ year old tape recorder (1/4 track, 1/4 inch, 7.5ips, Dolby B) which sound, to me, better than the original CD. The tape recorder specs claim 65dB SNR with Dobly. There's no way that I can have done anything other than _add_ noise, colouration, and distortion, and I know there's nothing above 17kHz on the tape, yet the sound is wonderful, smooth yet detailed, and without the harshness that you can get on some CD recordings, particularly older ones. If I had the time and money I'd make copies of all my CDs onto tape, but what with a reel of tape costing at least as much as the CD itself, and the hassle of threading the machine each time, I don't think I'll bother. :-)

>Of course, I master digitally on a DAT, because
>my analog setup would introduce more noise.

I mix (I don't master) to 1/2 track 1/4 inch tape at 15ips. No significant noise that I can hear, and more importantly, it sounds great. If I want to get my sounds onto CD I go to a mastering engineer who has better A/D converters than I could ever afford, and better than the ones in any DAT recorder.

Hang on to your 1200s

[Gaia]

It's not analogue though, it's digital so I'm not sure exactly who they are marketing this to. Vinyl DJs *like* surface noise, it's part of the experience. I also understand you can't scratch with this, which you can even with CDs now. CD DJs on the other hand are not too likely to give up on their vaste CD collections and flock to vinyl because of this. The only neat thing about this is that you can tape your broken records and the laser can still read them. Expensive solution though. Anyone have anything that rare?!?

Re:Hang on to your 1200s

[Gaia]

A valid point. However, if you have a system priced at $13,500/$20,500 I just can't imagine this catching on in the home audio market. If they sell 1,000 of these, I'll be amazed. It's kind of a neat idea (yeah, I realize it's analogue now - missed that before), but it's just not neat enough. I have several friends that DJ, it's what I'm used to.

Re:Hang on to your 1200s

[swordgeek]

I'm not sure exactly who they are marketing this to."

AAARRRRRGHHHH!!!!

Do the 20 year olds out there have to TRY this hard to be clueless? Doesn't anyone under the age of 30 understand that up until a few tiny years ago, vinyl was a reproduction medium? Here's a history lesson for you: For every minute of scratching done by (talentless hack) so-called DJs, there have been hundreds of hours of music listened to on record, over the last 50+ years. Bah. Why am I even bothering to try explaining. Suffice to say, libraries and museums have been buying these things for years.

Re:Hang on to your 1200s

[swordgeek]

Definitely not the mass market, but check out some of the high end stuff. Mark Levinson power amps go up to a list price of $35,000 (per pair--they're mono amps); similar price for Krell's top of the line. (and they're not the most expensive either!)
In that context, thye'll sell a few of these things.

Re:But the Home delivery is always FREE!

[slashdot-me]

Think you're young? I don't own any (music) CDs.

Ryan

Re:Very Strange...

[twinpot]

But your cheap CD-R with even a good soundcard fed through a great amp and speaker will still sound crap in comparison.

Different people are passionate about different things. To get some understanding, go to a hi-end Hi-Fi shop, and listen to some good recordings on a good setup. Beware though, you may end up with a distinct desire to spend some serious money before leaving! The big disadvantage of a decent setup is that is does highlight how crappy some recording are (CD or LP).

HERE, and only here, IS THE POINT.

[laetus]

The point be missed is that there are hundreds of millions of vinyl records in the hands of collectors, vinyl that will never be replaced. These records constitute an enormous amount of our modern (post 1800's) musical heritage and many have never been digitized. Having a laser to read them helps to ensure the quality of the recording will never be degraded.

Yeah, sure, some say digitize the vinyl and be done with it. But some listeners want to hear the recording in its original analog mellifluousness (a Katzian-style word in a tech posting -- see he does have influence).

And correct me if I am wrong, but can't a laser drive an analog process? The unit doesn't necessarily have to digitize the sound before playing it through the speakers.

Re:needles and dirt

[oscariommi]

When I want to listen to music, no hassle, I listen to mp3's.. When I want to 'feel' themusic, I play vinyls (on my VERY cheap vinylplayer)..
Who cares about soundquality (well, ok, I guess most people including me..) the 'feel' is more important too me.. It's psychological.. If anyoneone likes to listen to cd's all the time because they're supposed to be superior, that's alrighty with me..

Mmm, what was the point of my message again? Nevermind..

Non-Contact turntables

[jcr]

These are not a new thing, by any means. I was reading about laser-pickup turntables in Popular Science and Stereo Review, right around the time that CD's were first hitting the streets. (Early 80's)

-jcr

Laserdisks are DIGITAL, you idiot.

[jcr]

The RCA disks were digital too, they just used a capacitive sensor instead of an optical pickup.

-jcr

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[QuantumET]

> And thus is the difference between theoretical > science and engineering! Anybody have a > massless, frictionless pulley that I can borrow?

Sure, but you'll have to climb up the frictionless slope first. I put it on top of it, along with my Carnot engine and Lisa's little machine. Thought they'd be safe there.

Re:Fuck the DJs and the horse they rode in on!!!

[p0d]

Further proof, look at most catridge and needle designs nowadays. Most are pretty rugged and able to stand up to some BBB style scratchin'.

Read stereophile very month if you want to laugh

[Spyky]

This is hardly new. Products like this have been on the market for years. There has been a computer controlled turntable that first analyzes the surface of the record with the aid of a computer and laser pickup, then a traditional tonearm (but computer controlled) moves across the surface to play the music.
Whacked out products are all over the "audiophile" industry. Wanna see an 8' pair of speaker wire that costs $20k. They got 'em. Not to mention speakers that cost more then $100k. There is a wonderful CD player from Krell Industries (a mere $20k) that has an amazing real time interpolation filter, that generates a smoother signal then those awful jagged digital signals. Of course this will be rendered obsolete by Sony's SACD player, which, based on DVDs has a higher bitrate, word length and hence, smoother signal and costs $14k less. You just have to wait until your favorite recording is available.
Pick up a copy of sterophile magazine (subscription $12.99, montly issue $7.00, ouch!) to see some crazy products that are out there. Just don't fall for all the hype.

Spyky

Defeats the purpose of vinyl

[{Hecubus}]

I know a lot of people who insist that vinyl sounds better than CD's (providing the record is totally clean and scratch free).

They say this because they feel in some cases the conversion to digital format and back looses some of the original recording.

Digital formats have sampling rate and frequency limitations which, for the most part, will reproduce perfectly most sounds/music.

LP's don't have these limitations, so record enthusiasts buy their music on vinyl.

Therefore, reading the grooves of a record with a laser would completely defeat the purpose of vinyl.

I personally collect vinyl just because it's neat to have, and it's kind of old school. If I wanted to go out and buy new music, I'd probably buy a cd anyway.

No, how about pricing ...

[operagost]

... the damn things within range of middle-class people? Yikes! This price would be suitable for a profession version for remastering to CD, but not for home.

One model is capable of reading the entire range of 78-RPM records (which really ran from 77-80 RPM). It would be excellent for archiving of rare recordings, which is something I'd like to do with my father's huge collection. The price needs to be reduced by about 85% though.

The media is still analog!

[operagost]

You're absolutely right! The media is still, after all, analog. They're just using a different method of reading it. Likewise, you could make a digital format that was read by a physical application, just like records, and put it through a 40-year old tube amp. It would still be digital! analog=! old tech

78s aren't 78 RPM

[operagost]

They vary from 77-80. There were actually about 4 speeds in that range, thanks to inconsistencies in gear between the major studios.

But what about my 16 RPM half-masters? ;-)

so is it digital or analog?

[dboyles]

It's read with a laser, so it must go through digital processing. This would seem to undermine the goal of listening to vinyl - that is, to avoid the "noise" that some audiophiles feel is added through digital processing. Seems like not much more than an expensive toy (obviously) to show your friends rather than a realistic audiophile piece.

I bet a properly tuned Rega Planar would sound better.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[wass]

I think you're missing alot of points here. Firstly you write:
It's read with a laser, so it must go through digital processing.
Where does laser reading imply digital processing? THe optical input they're using to read the laser is most probably a photodiode, which would give an analog waveform. Granted, they're using 5 lasers probably to get a better picture of the "grooves" which seems to hint at some fancy DSP, but just using a laser in no means automatically implies "digital".

This would seem to undermine the goal of listening to vinyl - that is, to avoid the "noise" that some audiophiles feel is added through digital processing.
Ummmm, that's not why I listen to vinyl (I'm maybe semi audiophile). As far as I know, very vew albums are released not on Vinyl, most that are released are aimed for DJ's and spinners. I listen to vinyl because I'm into ALOT of the funky soul jazz from the 60's and 70's, much of which is very obscure and they'll never release the albums onto CD (probably because they'll sell 5 copies, one of which would be to me, but still not very profitable for them. Sucks...) If I could get most of this stuff on CD, I'd definitely go for it. In fact, once I get off my arse, I've got plans to lay out a decent analog-digital front-end for my computer such that I can sample the songs off my records onto MP3. THis leads me to the next point...

Seems like not much more than an expensive toy (obviously) to show your friends rather than a realistic audiophile piece.
You're missing one point here. While CD's and DAT's are digital, and employ some sort of error-correcting methodology, records are inherently analog. And every time you play the record, you damage it slightly (ultimately governed by quantum physics - you can't measure a system without changing it). In CD's, at least you've got some hysteresis between 0's and 1's, but with a record every time you play that track the needle drags in the groove and rubs it down a little. Just listen to a record track that's been played a hundred times or so, it can sound horrible, even if care was used with good sharp needles. That's why this laser system is pretty cool, because you don't need much contact with the record, so this won't be an issue. Also much harder to scratch now that you've removed the needle altogether.

Finally, I've not heard the arguments about DSP adding to the noise, can anyone comment on the validity of this? As far as I know, once the analog waveform has been sampled (which is where most limitations are introduced), they use 24 or 32 bit wide DSP's to avoid introducing any noticable errors through the processing stages. Then at the Digital-Analog stage, the choice of output filter can affect the waveform too. But I didn't think the DSP was too much to blame.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[CausticPuppy]

There are some artifacts and noise that even the best DSP's will add, solely due to the nature of converting to digital.
Imagine you have a recording with lots of high's, like around 5kHz. What happens when you try to convert a 5kHz waveform to digital?
Well if you're sampling at 44.1kHz, it'll take (on average) 8.82 samples to record one cycle of the 5kHz wave. Try to draw a complete crest and trough with only 8 points-- it's pretty jagged! Plus, you really can't have that .82 of a sample on the end... what actually happens is that the actual analog waveform falls out of phase with the sample rate, and then your sample points don't line up exactly on the peaks and valleys most of the time, because 44100 samples per second is not divisible by 5000 cycles per second. When the come back into phase, the tone sounds louder. What you hear off the CD then is not a true 5kHz tone, you hear a 5kHz jagged waveform that's being amplitute modulated, causing new frequencies to appear that weren't in the original waveform.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[CausticPuppy]

Since a large portion of the slashdot audience knows very little about signal theory... maybe a little "intuitive" analysis would help.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[CausticPuppy]

man harmonics

man fourier

And then read my reply to billybob jr.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[CausticPuppy]

It says any waveform can be reconstructed perfectly if the sampling rate is twice the highest freq. component in the signal.

It seems to me that if you had (for example) a 100Hz sawtooth wave, you couldn't ever reproduce it digitally. Well, with filters you could, and in essence a speaker cone is a filter, but let's just stick to theory.
A sawtooth wave is the sum of an infinite series of harmonics, ie sine wave components. Therefore, you'd have to sample at infinite frequency to reproduce it perfectly. Now, most people can't hear above 15kHz anyway and the realistic upper limit is 20kHz, so generally we're OK with 44.1kHz sampling.

BUT.... let's say you have a low, 60hz sine way. You sample it at 120Hz.
If you play it back digitally, at the 120Hz sample rate, do you get a 60hz sine wave? Absolutely not. You get a 60hz base with a bunch of higher harmonics thrown in, because you're playing back a 60hz triangle wave. A triangle wave contains higher frequency components that weren't there in the original recording. This is noise. So, you have to apply a filter on the output that blocks out all frequencies that are over half your sampling rate.

So, *my* interpretation of Nyquist's theorem is that if you sample at twice the frequency of the highest component you care about, you won't lose any information. But my point I was trying to make, before a bunch of engineers jumped on my case, was that the playback waveform has all the original sounds plus some additional unwanted artifacts, which has to be taken care of with filtering. In my mind, that's not a perfect reproduction. Fortunately, in a CD, most of the unwanted noise is well above the human range of perception, although there are other factors at play that can cause reduction in sound quality when recording to CD.

On another note (bad pun), there is a noticeable difference in sound quality between 24bit 96kHz audio vs. 16-bit 44.1kHz. According to Nyquist's theorem and the frequency response range of the human ear, that shouldn't be the case.
I suppose signal theory alone doesn't completely account for sound quality.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[CausticPuppy]

Okay, I understand what you're saying. I haven't had much education in signal theory either. But after some thought, I do know that if you're given a set of sample points, there's one and only one solution for a sine wave that fits those points. I wasn't thinking of this earlier though... I was pretty much assuming that the sample points were just going to be read only as voltage levels on the output. There were some other issues I didn't address that cause loss of sound quality with AD/DA conversion. Some people will do a master on a DAT at 48kHz, and then do a sample rate conversion to 44.1kHz which kinda screws things up. But that's not what this discussion was about.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[CausticPuppy]

man am I bored.

Here's what I know about DSP: Korg, Proteus, Tascam. And that the SBLive does sample rate conversions when you don't want it to.
At least in the end, there's always beer.

I'll stick to quantum mechanics from now on...

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[CausticPuppy]

Well yeah, that's assuming your DAC is doing a nice job of reconstructing the sine wave. If you sample any waveform at 120 samples/sec with a fundamental of 60Hz and that only has harmonic overtones (120,180, etc) the output will always be the same. As far as I know, most DAC's don't do this very well at their frequency limit, in which case the output would be more "connect-the-dots" and you'd have a triangle waveform with some slightly rounded-off tips.

Most audio pros work with the digital audio at 96k and then downsample right before the CD master. On the other hand, my SBLive insists on outputting 48khz, which makes that card useless for digital transfers to/from DAT that wind up on CD. I just do everything at 44.1k (on another soundcard) and I'm happy.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[billybob jr]

I wasn't the AC, but here are some quotes from _Signals&Systems_. It's written by Oppenheim and Willsky. We use it in my Signals and Systems class.

"if a signal is band limited-- i.e., if its Fourier transform is zero outside a finite band of frequencies--and if the samples are taken sufficiently close together in relation to the highest frequency present in the signal, then the samples uniquely specify the signal, and we can reconstruct it perfectly."
....
"The frequency 2wm (that's two omega sub m) which, under the sampling theorem (see previous paragraph), must be exceeded by the sampling frequency, is commonly referred to as the Nyquist rate."
"The frequency wm (omega sub m) corresponding to one-half the Nyquist rate is often referred to as the Nyquist frequency."

What this says is basically: Any waveforms with frequencies lower than one half the sampling rate can be reconstructed perfectly (in theory).

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[billybob jr]

You are confusing my Caustic Puppy!
No replies to any of my posts

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[billybob jr]

If you have two samples of a 100 Hz _sine_ wave close enough together (both samples are in the same period) then you can construct it perfectly. That is what I was trying to say. Those two samples hold the key to that sine wave. They contain enough "information" to fully recreate the sine wave.

This is the real world. I'm not particularly knowledgable in signal theory. I have spent some time reading rec.audio.high-end. There were some extroardinarily technical arguments having to do with filtering and cd audio playback and problems with the current CD standard. I'm not arguing that CD audio playback is perfect. It isn't. I'm sure there are harmonics created by the digital to audio conversion.

However, if you take a 60 Hz sine wave and sample it at 120 Hz. Then play it back, you won't get a 60 Hz triangle wave. The mathematics behind the digital to audio conversion is more complex than that. You will get a sine wave.

If I took some graph paper, and plotted two points on it. I could only draw one sine wave that would go through those two points in less than one cycle. Is a CD player going to recreate this perfectly, no. I've heard arguments for 24 bit 96 kHz audio. They are signal theory arguments. Unfortunately I don't know them.

Re:so is it digital or analog?

[Dahan]

man oppenheim

man schafer

man discrete-time signal processing

(Whose side am I on anyways? :)

A Few Notes/Comments

[lukpac]

Why the vacumm cleaner? - Standard record needles will push away small specs of dust and dirt. Since this turntable uses a laser that never actually touches the LP, it can't push anything aside. Thus, it will "see" dirt and dust that normal turntables don't. You need the cleaner to get all that junk out of the grooves...

Who would buy this? - This isn't meant for just anyone. It's meant for people who have things on vinyl that simply can't be replaced. It *should* be required at record companies. I know of many instances where original tapes to a recording no longer exist and a record is the only source available. Or, in the case of any music pre-1950 - magnetic tape didn't exist. All music was recorded direct to wax. It would sure be nice to have that music without crackles and pops...

Digital? - I can't say I'm an expert on the system, but the site clearly states the system is *not* digital:

Q: Is the Laser Turntable digital?

No. The Laser Turntable processes the musical information as an analogue signal. A laser beam is directed to the groove of record. The reflection is changed based on the shape of groove. Position Sensitive Detector (PSD) receives that reflection and generates electrical signals. The purest music is maintained by keeping the signal analog throughout the system.

Personally I'd *love* to have one of these - I like a lot of older (read: classic rock) music, and often, certain things just are not available on CD. This would be perfect to transfer them into the digital domain...

Re:needles and dirt

[Shanep]

And what's more, the left and right chanels are encoded into the one groove. So the media is flawed before it is even played. This reduces chanel seperation to audible levels and does'nt even come close to that of CD.

Plus, the heat generated on the needle, melts all sound 15kHz and up after a few plays. If taken care of, CD is digital perfect for longer than we will live.

And, at the top end, a human hears a 20kHz square, triangle, sine or complex waveform as a 20kHz sine wave. This is due to the fact that a pure waveform of only one frequency (in audio and electromagnetics) is made up of nothing more than a sine waveform at that same frequency. A square wave or anything other than a sine is made up of a base sine plus many other higher frequency sines that build the "sharper features". These higher frequency sines are attenuated to oblivion by our ears and audio digital sampling filters.

I can't stand hearing these "audiophiles" crap on about analogue quality. They say stuff like "...this tube amp gives a mellow warmth...", I call it distortion.

I wish they'd just get over the fact that analog has only small parts in the highest quality systems. High quality analog is still needed before the transducers, but holding on to analog media is a mistake to say the very least.

A $150 digital player will far outperform a $20,000 analogue player and that is a pretty sad state of affairs.

Re:Audiophiles

[Shanep]

Why not avoid the environment all together and do what I and many others do, some of which don't realise it.

Use far less amplification leading to far less distortion and noise, resolve incredible channel seperation and block out more ambient noise whilst creating little...

Headphones!

Re:CED Laserdisk would've been a kick ass audio fm

[Shanep]

"Digital/analog has absolutely nothing to do with "quality"."

Yeah it does, it is far easier and cheaper to make a high quality audio system using digital as a medium than it is via analog.

With digital, add one bit and your quality doubles, with analog mediums, to double your quality you have to work a damn lot harder.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[Shanep]

The maximum frequency a human can hear is a sinewave at that frequency. Any waveform other than a sinewave at that maximum frequency is made up of a sine at that base frequency plus many other higher frequency sines. Those higher frequency sines are removed by our ears and guess what else? Digital sampling used in audio recording. Low pass filters that match the best human ears have to offer. So there is no quality lost that a human could possibly perceive.

It is true that digital sampling is limited by resolutions in the time and amplitude domains being sampling frequency and sampling resoluton in bits. But analog recording is limited in frequency and by noise, added to this by the medium and then added to this again by the amplification. In the analog world, these issue compound the problem each time.

Digital audio gets a limit hit at the recording stage and then those limits stay largly unchanged though the medium and then the output stage to your ears. But thankfully for us, the limits imposed on digital recording for CD's and the like are beyond the limits of our own ears.

Analog is better than digital in theory only if you do not consider the limits of analog electronics and storage.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[Shanep]

It is not fair to say "With 16-bit audio, the best S/N ratio you can hope for is 96db" because it only applies to the conversion of 16bit samples to an analog signal. Interpolation of 16bit samples to a higher bit depth and then converted via a DAC of that bit depth will not lead to a better 20kHz sine wave, but it will lead to a better SNR.

Take a look at many high end CD players! The Yamaha CDX-1060 has an SNR of 120dB and many go higher. Ever heard of over sampling?

This is not really news

[haggar]

I have read about this system to read tracks in a vinyl record. I remember they mentioned 4 laser beams, and a Japanese company sellingtheir model for about 1000 US$.

Well, maybe I am saying the obvious, but for me, the best way of preserving those "black" discs, is to record them on CDs.

Old news

[anatoli]

Messages about these turntables can be found at DejaNews, dated back at 1996. Here's a prepackaged search for you:

here
--

How to spend that money

[jedrek]

Look, this is crazy. You could probably hire an OK 4 quartet for one year for the cost a listening room like that... But then they're probably bitch that the instruments are mistuned.

It takes all kinds...


-- polish ccs mirror

Analog IS better than digital

[CausticPuppy]

I agree -- analog is better quality than digital, in theory, because a digital signal is only an approximation of the original analog source. Think about what "analog" means. You store a signal on one medium that is a direct analog of the recorded signal.
However, with digital, you're taking repeated samples, and approximating each sample to the nearest quantized level determined by the bit depth. So you lose some quality converting to digital.
And then you lose some more when going from digital back to analog, which you HAVE to do with sound or you can't hear it.
You can build an purely analog sound system that introduces less noise than digital. The big advantage digital has is the ability to make exact reproductions, with no loss from generation to generation.
That doesn't change the fact that you can't make a true 10khz sine wave on a CD (roughly 4 sample points per cycle, and you actually have a sawtooth wave that phases in and out w/ the sample rate).
To get the best of both worlds for audio, you need to go digital with a very high sample rate (96kHz) at 24-bit depth. That way you have a much better digital approximation of an analog signal.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[CausticPuppy]

What universe do you live in? In mine, you can't do that. The best you can do is store a signal that is an analog of the source

Thanks for rephrasing what I already said.

And this quantization noise can easily be less than the noise introduced in going to an analog medium. Easily. What consumer-available analog medium has better SNR than you get with 16-bit quantization?

Did I say consumer-level? I was speaking on principle. Let's see... a near perfect analog system would consist of 1) somebody playing an acoustic instrument, and 2) a human ear. Better SNR than 16-bit quantization, and the only noise in the system is going to be due to bloodflow in the ear (ok, maybe dogs and traffic if you're not in a sound room). Anything else processing the sound in between, digital or analog, is just going to add noise.

Please, learn Nyquist's theorem. Audio is bandlimited. You can reconstruct it perfectly from discrete samples. No "sawtooth wave" at all.

...as long as the highest frequency is less than half the sampling rate. Yes, I know. In actuality, you can't (without filters) recreate a perfect SINE WAVE (that was my point), but you'll get something that's the same frequency. However, anything that's not a sine wave would have harmonics added which you won't hear anyway, and don't need. Now I'm sure some more DSP engineers are going to want to jump in again and smack me around, but I'm speaking purely from a musician's standpoint.

Nyquist's theorem is useful for data transmission. If it is applied to audio, then there's really no reason that a classical music CD should sound worse than actually being there, even when played on the best hardware. But then we'd be getting into psychoacoustics.

Correct me on this if I'm wrong (but do it nicely). If the original sound source has two signal components of 60kHz and 65kHz, there will be a tertiary tone of 5kHz as a result of the other two being superimposed. Is that 5kHz tone sampled successfully with a 44.1kHz sampling rate?

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[CausticPuppy]

Let's compare an ideal, perfect AD converter with an ideal, perfect analog recorder.
With 16-bit audio, the best S/N ratio you can hope for is 96db, am I correct? I haven't seen the math behind this, I've just read this in several places as being the theoretical S/N ratio for 16-bit digital audio.
With an ideal, perfect, doesn't-exist analog system, it's much higher. Like I said, the closest thing is the human ear.
If I had my way, all my digital equipment would work @ 24 bit 96kHz. But that's expensive...
When I said "analog is better than digital" I was referring to the ideal conditions. Of course, I master digitally on a DAT, because my analog setup would introduce more noise.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[CausticPuppy]

There are actually upper limits on the SNR of an analog system, too, that result from the effects of thermal noise, but I don't know what they are, off-hand. Also, you never truly have infinite bandwidth.

That's a shame, because that will be a requirement for Windows 2010. The problem with keeping a system thermally noise free (absolute zero) is that as soon as you have a signal, you have heat, and thus noise.

The thing is, I find that comparing devices that can only exist in theory to be rather pointless.

And thus is the difference between theoretical science and engineering! Anybody have a massless, frictionless pulley that I can borrow?

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[CausticPuppy]

morons who know nothing about signal processing beyond Nyquist-Shannon theory but here goes.

I know what you mean-- those retarded idiots that don't know anything about nanophase solid-state physics beyond the Hall-Petch relationship annoy the crap out of me too. [/sarcasm]

However, you did give a reason why 96kHz audio is preferable (especially during the mixing stage) compared to 44kHz 16-bit.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[Seenhere]

Think about what "analog" means. You store a signal on one medium that is a direct analog of the recorded signal.

What universe do you live in? In mine, you can't do that. The best you can do is store a signal that is an analog of the source, plus unavoidable noise and distortion.

However, with digital, you're taking repeated samples, and approximating each sample to the nearest quantized level determined by the bit depth. So you lose some quality converting to digital.

And this quantization noise can easily be less than the noise introduced in going to an analog medium. Easily. What consumer-available analog medium has better SNR than you get with 16-bit quantization?

That doesn't change the fact that you can't make a true 10khz sine wave on a CD (roughly 4 sample points per cycle, and you actually have a sawtooth wave that phases in and out w/ the sample rate).

Please, learn Nyquist's theorem. Audio is bandlimited. You can reconstruct it perfectly from discrete samples. No "sawtooth wave" at all.

--Seen

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[Seenhere]

Did I say consumer-level? I was speaking on principle.

Well, since we live in a physical universe, and you don't run your analog electronics at absolute zero, they are going to introduce noise. In principle. With a digital data stream, you can design the system so the noise has no effect. You can't do that with analog.

Anything else processing the sound in between, digital or analog, is just going to add noise. Right. And when you're talking about going through the number of stages required to record on commercially available media, digital can easily be designed to introduce less noise than analog. Most audiophiles don't care about the poor signal to noise ratio of analog, though. They rather seem to like it. Never developed a taste for it myself.

If the original sound source has two signal components of 60kHz and 65kHz, there will be a tertiary tone of 5kHz as a result of the other two being superimposed. Is that 5kHz tone sampled successfully with a 44.1kHz sampling rate?

The 5kHz beat would be a result of nonlinear mixing of the components, for example in the cochlea or in neural processing. Tranmission of sound through air is very linear at normal SPLs. If you have a linear analog system with rolloff well below 60kHz (i.e. a good vinyl recording and playback system) the components won't be there in the output and you won't hear the 5kHz beat. If you are doing digital at 44.1kHz sampling, you will want to rolloff the signal above 22kHz, so the components won't be in the output there either.

If you had a multiplicative nonlinearity in the input stage, you could generate the 5kHz beat there, and record it. Some people might even like that.

--Seen

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[billybob jr]

I think you are over simplifying the operation of digital audio. If you only sampled a sine input at four times during one period of the wave, and then played "connect the dots" between those four dots, yes you would have a saw tooth wave. But it is far from this simple. I believe the foundation for digital audio comes from the fact that if you sample a sine wave twice during one period, you know _exactly_ what wave it was you were sampling. You can, in theory recreate a perfect sine wave from only two samples per cycle. CD players are more sophisticated than what you are describing.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[moogla]

About the 5kHz pickup: If the 2 signals are mixed BEFORE the lowpass required for ADC, you WILL get the 5kHz tone, because this tone will be the only harmonic that passes through the filter. Same for pure analog. If the signals are lowpassed before mixing (because of some smart-alecky amp or soundcard), there will be no signal at all.

Re:Analog IS better than digital

[entropy_uc]

I probably shouldn't jump into this since I'm likely to get flamed to hell and back by the morons who know nothing about signal processing beyond Nyquist-Shannon theory but here goes.
Discrete Fourier transforms are nowhere near as 'perfect' as Shannon-Nyquist would lead you to believe. It works fine if your signal is very well behaved. (Basically it needs to be composed of uniformly spaced sine waves). The catch works like this: When you select a sampling rate for your DFT you have decided on a basis set of frequencies that you will use for your representation of the signal. If your signal has a wavelenghth of 4.5 times the sampling rate, shannon-nyquist says you can perfectly reproduce the signal. In fact you can't. What you get is ~50% of the signal at 4x, ~50% at 5x and then significantly lower signals at EVERY other wavelength in your DFT. A good rule of thumb is that you need to sample at around 7x your frequency cutoff to accurately represent signals that aren't well behaved.

Re:After a certain point it doesn't matter

[CausticPuppy]

True... for a speaker to produce a true square wave, it can't have any intertia. For that matter, the cone has to tunnel from A to B without going the distance between for each cycle, requiring a negative energy field, which would probably have a side effect of destroying the planet.
However, as soon as the Klipsch Promedia's come off of backorder, I'll have the next best thing.

After a certain point it doesn't matter

[Rares Marian]

The speakers cannot produce real square waves they either ditort or compensate. So maybe you have a saw toothe but the speaker thanks to StepMother in Law Physics smooths it out.

Re:Big bucks

[papa248]

One thing I've been doing recently (to the chagrin of the RIAA) is digitizing my LP collection personally. After I clean the album with a vacuum and wet solution, I play it back on my good (but 20 year old) player into my computer. I use CoolEdit Pro to filter out pops and such for albums that require it, then burn them onto a CD. I realize that all this A/D converting loses some quality, but considering that I can play a CD on my computer, in my car, and not worry about wrecking it after a few listenings makes it worthwhile.

*How* may rpm?

[davidc]

Wow. One will do 60 and 90 rpm. And to think I used to play my singles at a measly 45 and my 78s at, well, er, 78. At 60 RPM a Chipmunks single must be very entertaining :-)

On the up side, these do contain an "excellent vacuum cleaner". Wonder how it deals with kitty litter deep in the carpet?

Re:Big mouth and No Brains

[letchhausen]

Once again we have some talking trash about that which he knows not of. If you have the money who is to say that it's brainless to spend it on that which you enjoy? Obviously someone who jumps to conclusions without thinking things through. I might not have the interest in fashion to spend 30k on designer clothing but I don't quibble with those who do.

You seem to have more mouth than brains.

IMHO vinyl as always kicked ass over CD's even to the extent that a Muddy Waters Mobile Fidelity Gold Cd versus the Mo-Fi (R.I.P.) vinyl wasn't even close, and the CD had the advantage of being played on a 30k well-matched system against my 5k home LP setup. Neil Young and a host of others truly believe that the sterile sound of CD's is horrible. There is constantly evolving technology to improve digital sound to where it will approach the analog experience. And it is an analog experience, ours ears don't hear ones and zeroes.

Since a decent Rockport setup can cost like 30k and I think the Forsell is even more, this laser turntable falls in the neighbirhood of the best high-end equipment. Allow for the fact that there are tons of records that are just not ever going to be pressed on CD and the best one can do is get a vinyl copy. Many Collectors already have a significant investment in thousands of LP's and so a way to protect that investment without wear on the records makes the price less outrageous.

I know computer geeks that spend thousands on multiple systems and videophiles that drop 10k on HDTV. Fabio spent 250k for specially built speakers. I spend all of my money on books and records (which isn't much). I think that we all put our money where our interest is and the only difference is that some poor sap such as yourself feels the need to judge those who spend more than you do. I bet there is some dirt poor family somewhere who would find your spending habits extravagant and ridiculous.

I'll probably never be able to afford one of these laser 'tables new, but in a few years maybe I'll get used older model for 2-3k and be happy as a clam.

Interesting, but not new

[pnot]

I remember seeing this on BBC tech programme "Tomorrow's World" years and years ago. And the website seems to confirm that it's been around for a while:

The after-sales service of ELP is perfect. Although I had a failure on LT in 1990, I am fully satisfied with the LT...

Anyway, for a roundup of the most fantastically cool conventional turntables (all of which beat the laser one hands down on looks ;-) check out this site.

But what about the DJs?

[root_dev_X]

Damn... $20,500 for a single turntable... and to think that i can get a pair of Technics SL1200 MK3D's (if god was a DJ, he'd use these turntables) for 1/20th of the price :)

But seriously, there is so much to be said for the quality and interactivity of vinyl. Not only is the sound better, but when was the last time you could back-que or 'scratch' a CD?

Even though this is pretty damn cool, i think that it's best use would be to swap this one with someone's laserdisc player (remember those?) and watch them freak out when it won't read they're discs :)

Alex -DJ Warble-
root_dev_X@yahoo.com
http://blender.sufftech.net

Re:But what about the DJs?

[perky]

fine decks, but God should also consider the new Vestax PDX - D3S turntables, which many of the top dj's are moving over to. I hear that home in London and various other clubs are installing them as an alternative to the staple 1200s because the djs are requesting them (for example Carl Cox)

Re:Isn't the wavelength of light too long for this

[jwo7777777]

It is not strictly necessary to read laser light digitally. Variations in the vinyl disk can be read in terms of continuous changes in reflectance or position of the reflected beam(s). In short, it is possible to read a laser in analog style (as far as the pickup is concerned).

Re:Big bucks

[Ravagin]

Oh my gods, you're right! Why do I even still play Rogue or NetHack? I mean, they're far too time-consuming. And with today's technologies, I could slay those Orcs in 3D with blood spattering all over the place and finish a level in only ten mintues! My god, why play an ASCII game that takes minimal system resources and which is different each time when I could be hogging system resources killing polygonal demons in always-the-same levels?
[/sarcasm]
One word: novelty
-Ravagin
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"

No point buying two of these.

[heikkih]

No (wannabe?) DJ should get sweaty about these as I say they would be quite hard mixing with. Then i'd rather get my hands of two of the brand new Vestax PDX-D3S They got an instant-speed-stick-controller, reverse play, a quartz lock and optional linking of multiple decks to control them all from one deck. Maybe it's finally time to give those Technics a rest.

These ELP's are for audiophiles-only. I guess I'd like one for sampling my vinyl-collection though :-) Since my grandad hasn't wanted to share of his old 78rpm-glass-album-collection yet, I could do with the "cheap" version for now.

wicky-wicky-scratch-wicky-scratch

[phlake]

thm-thm-thm-chk
thmmmmm-thm-chk
wicky-zwipp-swap
thm-chk-a-thm
thmmmmm-thm-chk

Price

[acm]

I wonder how many of the people who say this is a waste of technology / money actually own any vinyl.

Yes these tables are really expensive, but so was that Sony robo-dog and what use do you really get from that?

Bear's take on the subject...

[sgage]

Here is some very interesting commentary on analog vs. digital and what a stylus does to a vinyl record groove, etc. by none other than Stanley Owsley. Yes, THAT Owsley. (Check out his Ice Age theory on the same page if you want a mind-blower!)

Here ya go:

Bear's Analog vs. Digital Essay

Long time to market i guess

[Vanders]

Other UK readers may remember that this system was demoed on Tommorows World way back when (I think late 80's, early 90's) I thought it was pretty cool then, but i guess it's taken a long time to get anyone interested in making the things.

Re:Dr. CPU?

[Vanders]

No, he is a real person. My mate Hugh Jazz knows Dr CP Yu personally ;)

Turntables and MP3s?

[pim]

Actually these two pieces of technology can be much more interwoven than the casual observer would guess. With pride Mad Science Labs present you a future OpenHardware project:

LP ROM
A good quality turntable can generate an analogue signal with enough bandwidth to store at least a 128 kilobit modulated datastream. This means that it is perfectly feasible to use vinyl as storage for MP3 files. A very smart encoder should even be able to deal with matters like pitch control and scratching (up to a certain point).

I thank you.

Pi

Re:digitize it

[friedo]

0 to 9? I don't think you quite understand what analog means. The signal recorded on a vinyl record is a representation of the actual sound wave hitting the original microphone's diaphragm, minus electrical distortion and such. As the sylus moves up and down in the grooves of the record, it moves inside a magnetic field, generating a current, which is sent to your amplifier. The amplified current is sent to your speakers, whose magnets move in and out with the current, making sound again. Vinyl recording has nothing to do with numbers at all. Now as for which is better, I don't know. I have a few albums on vinyl that I also have on CD. The CD sounds a lot "cleaner" to me, and the recording and sampling is certainly of a higher quality, but the LP does feel more "natural" even with all the hiss and pop.

Fuck the DJs and the horse they rode in on!!!

[swordgeek]

Damn it all to hell, I'm SICK OF HEARING, "but what about the DJs? What good is this table if you can't scratch on it?"

Some of you youngsters should beat it into your thick skull that the original and still primary purpose for a turntable is reproducing sound that's on records. NOT scratching, NOT sampling, and NOT back-cueing.

Furthermore, there are a lot of records out there, some well over half a century old, which are one-of-a-kind. There are historic recordings on wax cylinders (including some of Caruso) which will NEVER be copied onto CD or MP3...unless they can read those recordings in a non-destructive process. For record studios, for museums, and for archivists, this sort of technology is invaluable.

So if you STILL can't figure it out;

1) These turntables are not aimed at DJs.
2) Most turntables made aren't aimed at DJs.
3) The world of vinyl doesn't revolve around DJs.
4) Deal with it.

Re:Fuck the DJs and the horse they rode in on!!!

[swordgeek]

"And im real sorry, but most turntables ARE aimed at djs. I can think of roughly 10 models off the top of my head which are aimed at djs... including the venerable Technics SL-1200-MK2, and kids are buying boatloads of them!"

Heh heh heh... Considering the SL-1200 was originally considered a 'DJ-quality playback table, the above statement is amusing. Regardless, I can list probably five times that many turntables that are aimed at audiophiles/old vinyl owners.

More to the point, "VINYL IS BEAUTIFUL!" I can agree with that. As long as people are willing to accept that a turntable could possibly be useful for or even (gasp!) aimed at a group OTHER than DJs, we can all get along.

Save the Vinyl!

[Luke Skywalker]

I think we're missing the point here, or at least one of them. Has anyone ever listened to their favorite record over and over again, until it started "skipping" at a particular point? I know I have, and it's darn annoying.

What's worse, whenever you encounter a skip, there's no way to fix it. You can lift the needle off of the record and put it down, but then you miss some of the music and can cause additional skips. Really, the only way to avoid this (until now) was to copy it onto a cassette before it started deteriorating. For those of us that are purists, or have older LP's that never had that chance, we were clean out of luck.

This new development is cool. A laser doesn't even need to touch the disk, and so they won't wear out from use anymore. A laser system can also be designed so that the skip-inducing irregularities developed in the LP are completely irrelevant.

Finally, a way to listen to my Limelighter's LP without that annoying skip in the same place! I anticipate that within the next five years, laser-based turntables will become standard on home audio systems. I am looking forward to it!

Missing the importance of this laser player

[nyamada]

I think a lot of people are missing the point here. This turntable (which was prototyped in the late 80s, it's true, but only released via Japanese capital now) is a revolutionary thing for vinyl/shellac records. LPs, 45s & 78s have the potential to last a lot longer than CDs. I have 78s that are easily 90 years old that still play & have the potential to last to the end of the century without detriorated further. CDs have an unknown life expectancy. The polymer layers can/will detriorate & when they do, the information is just --- gone.... The problem with records is the playback medium always wears the grooves down more, so they will slower wear away with play. But this turntable offers a wear-free way playing back records. I realize this is high-end audio porn price level -- but if I had the dough, I'd buy one in a flash. I've been recorded both on records and on CDs, all on obscure labels which will never be reissued (unless a miracle happens) & I bet you my vinyl records will be in much better shape in 60 years.

Very Strange...

[nlaporte]

Did anyone see what the article said? Your LP's have to be spotlessly clean in order for them to sound good at all. You can reap the same benifit of a digital LP with a CD-R drive and some cheap software like Adaptec's Toast 4 Deluxe ($99.95). This product is really aimed at gullible audiophiles who have no computer experience.

Skratch DJs of the world rejoice!

[klyX]

This is so sweet! I've been wondering who would be the first to create one of these . . . When the price gets down to the public (uhh, a decade? :) you can be assured every Turntablist out there will be on these. No replacement styli, superior sound and most importantly no skipping! Even the most "heavy handed" skratcher can go to town on one of these joints . . .

But the Home delivery is always FREE!

[rjamestaylor]

I almost decided not to place my order for the LT-1XA because I fretted over the shippings costs (you priced UPS since they went public??).

But the deal was saved by the offer of FREE HOME DELIVERY. Now I know I'm saving BIG TIME!

*Sigh*

I just remembered...

I don't own any LPs!

Oh well... off to eBay before my wife finds out...(DOH!)

:-only kona in my cup-:
:-robert taylor-:

FP?

[Phouk]

FP?

Re:FP?

[Phouk]

OK, now I can read what the story is about... :-)

Re:Biology introduces distortion

[tburkhol]

CP's key point seems to be: nothing you record will be what I hear. The problem is: what you hear is not "what is there", either. Vibrations travel differently through the twisted passage of your ear, some get picked up by your skull (once they've been filtered by your skin), and all of this in a slightly different way than in my ear and skull. Human "SNR" is very definitely not unboundedly large.

Audiophiles

[weisserw]

I am told by those in the know that most so-called "audiophiles" are wasting their time with high-tech gadgets like this. 99% of sound quality is the acoustic environment of the room you're listening in, not the "horizontal tracking angle error compensation" or whatever.

Just my 2 cents.

-W.W.

Re:Audiophiles

[Farq Fenderson]

99% of sound quality is the acoustic environment of the room you're listening in, not the "horizontal tracking angle error compensation" or whatever

Very good point except for one thing: the first thing I thought of was wow, now I can scratch without destroying my [insert record worth more than soul] record.

However, at the listed price, I would simply continue abstaining from scratching said items.
---

Re:Big mouth and No Brains

[Uberminky]

I might not have the interest in fashion to spend 30k on designer clothing but I don't quibble with those who do.

Quibbling with the quibblers, however, is another matter entirely. ;) Anyway, my personal opinion is that there is no amount of "interest" that could make fashion worth $30k. Same goes for computers, A/V equipment, and pretty much anything else. If you've got $30k to blow on what you love... well go for it.

You seem to have more mouth than brains.

Ouch...

And it is an analog experience, ours ears don't hear ones and zeroes.

Funny... I didn't know speakers (or air) could even transfer ones and zeros... Anyway, my point is that you never "hear" a digital signal, only analog. So maybe today's CDs can't compare to a good LP (which I can't say I can tell, but hey...). But generalizations like "Digital can never compare to analog" (which you didn't necessarily make) are ludicrous. I am of the opinion that it wouldn't be THAT hard ("that" being $30k) to come up with a digital system capable of outputing analog waveforms *identical* to analog systems (to any reasonable degree). But who cares anyway... I can't believe I just wasted all that time typing all this out... [yawn] Back to coding...

Big bucks

[348]

Way too expensive, with todays alternate technologies why in the world would anyone buy something like this?

digitize it

[roman_mir]

Why build all this stuff instead of simply digitizing the LP's to CD's? Why not build an LP digitizing service and charge for it the cost of a CD and the time it takes to digitize and record!

Re:digitize it

[roman_mir]

If vinyl actually did store sound in 0-9 digits, then vinyl would be digital. 0/1 is not the only digital format that may exist. You can have any number of variations like 0/1/2, 0/1/2/3, 0/1/2/3/4/ ... /n where n -> infinity. All of these are still digital but the more variations you have, the less space is needed to store a digital file, on the other hand the more variations you have the harder it is to come up with efficient algorithms for search.

Re:digitize it

[djdead]

the main reason NOT to digitize records is that many people believe (myself included) that vinyl has much better sound. two reasons quickly for are that since cd's are digital the sound information (which is naturaly analog) is treated as only 1's and 0's so it's either on or off. records however can have values from 0-9. this allows for a much broad range of variations in the sound. the other reason is that cd's are limited to a 96 db range. vinyl is limited to something around a 120 db range.

Re:digitize it

[Rudie]

If you follow the link you'll find out that
this is exactly what it's used for, digitalising
of LPs.

Awesome!

[HalB]

This is awesome, just what I have been looking for to play my old Chimpunk albums!

Dr. CPU?

[the31337lc]

..."Dr. CP Yu, Brain Surgeon and Leader of HKMA Orchestra, Hong Kong"

You sure this isn't a joke? Dr. CPU?

Laserdiscs aren't necessarily DIGITAL

[iainl]

Actually, to be picky, laserdiscs have an analogue picture, and room for both analogue stereo and digital (at 16bit 44.1khz) stereo sound.

You can replace the right analogue channel with a Dolby Digital stream, and/or replace the PCM digital stream with a DTS stream if you wish, but there is certainly nothing to stop a disc having no digital media content at all.

Time Warner to this

[iainl]

Yep, I agree - the 1200 is the only one to go for if you want to DJ, but for the same price you can get far nicer turntables for plain old listening. Don't be scared of belt drive; the real reason for going direct is you can stop the platter for lining up/scratching without wrecking your drive mechanism, rather than anything to do with improving your sound.

Personally, I'm very happy with my NAD 933, and recommend it to anyone who wants a turntable for the ~£200 mark.

Re:Big Bucks and No Brains - I beg to differ.

[esobofh]

When you enjoy audio and video as a form of entertainment enough to spend the big dollars on equipment, alot of effort goes into making sure that the equipments performance justifies it's cost. Light dimmers don't cause problems only when they are in use. Light dimmers are the biggest source of ground loop faults in a home these days...

I live in the downstairs portion of a large house, when the upstairs tenants decided to move i took the opportunity to redo all the wiring upstairs before the new tenants moved in.. effectively replacing all the dimmers and such with standard light switches, or with isolated dimmer switches.. the difference is night and day.. my Cable tv signal is 100% better and the sound pumping out of my receiver is noticeably better.

for those of you that are interested, the second largest source of grounding problems is with the incoming tv cable.. alot of times the outside conductor is not grounded in the same place as the house ground is grounded at, and as a result you have different grounding values.. - this throws off everything in your system if you have different components connected to each other.

----------------------------

Laser turntables do NOT work well--they are a scam

[Sara Chan]

Research was conducted on laser turntables in the 1970s. They cannot work well. Following is a brief summary of why.

When a record lacquer is cut, it does not result in a very good replica of the input signal; this is because the lacquer is elastic and thus stretches and distorts during cutting. In addition to this, cutting the lacquer builds stresses into the lacquer subsurface.

Both the surface distortions and the subsurface stresses are transferred from the lacquer to the record during pressing. A laser tracking a record will read the surface distortions as part of the music signal. A laser will also completely miss the subsurface stresses. These subsurface stresses hold significant information. Thus a laser will miss some information, and the information that it does retrieve will be distorted.

A conventional stylus playing a record can do a better job than a laser for two reasons. First, the pressure of a stylus on an elastic (vinyl) record causes the surface to stretch and distort in a way that largely compensates for the distortions that were cut into the record lacquer. Second, the stylus sinks some way into the groove and is thus able to retrieve information stored in the subsurface.

The same laser-turntable scam was tried around 1990--then known as the "Finial" turntable. In listening tests its performance proved mediocre: investors lost much (all?) of their money. You should stay away from this one as well.

Re:Big mouth and No Brains

[Perdo]

I like the way you think and I've read a few of your posts. *but* (there's always one of those eh?) There is no way to perfectly covert an analog signal to digital and back again. No matter how you accomplish your A/D conversion (Continuously variable slope delta, pulse code, sigma-delta coversion, etc..)digital must sample at finite frequencies a wave form as that is infinitly complex. Consider the coastal length geometry problem. If you measured the coast of the US at one meter resolution the length of the coast would me considerably shorter than if you measured it at 1 mm resolution where you would measure the diameter of every pebble in the water. Whether the human ear can dicern the difference between 32kb/s sampleing rate and 64kb/s sampleing rate is a matter of opinion. I understand birds will not answer their species calls at a digital sampleing rate of less than 256kb/s. Birds don't like speakers that are limited to human hearing ranges either. Sampleing music at a higher rate is a job for CD's eventual replacement. I don't think if we get to 128kb/s there will be anyone who still thinks "LPs are better man"

Two Turntables and a Laser Beam

[Orangetree]

I think this was mentioned about seven years ago on a BBC programme called Tomorrow's World. So hey, breaking news...