Laser turntable
Filed in: tech, Thu, May 12 2005 20:38 PT
Gizmodo has news of a turntable that reads the grooves via laser, so as not to wear down your vinyl. That’s so cool.
I actually had this idea several years ago, but didn’t bother doing anything like writing it down, much less patenting it. Which, after suing this manufacturer, would have made me moderately rich and destined for the warmer sections of hell. I’m content to see things that I thought would be a good idea actually start to exist.
May 12th, 2005 at 23:43 UTC
Hmmn, don’t really have time to google this extensively, but as far as I know, this has existed, in one form or another, for a good two decades.
Not sure about the details, but it definitely involved the use of laser to get contact-free reading of “vinyl” records.
Among others, I believe some Japanese radios used these incredibly expensive contraptions at the time, to spare their super rare records.
I’d say the only noticeable change is the introduction of this technology to a wider market…
So you may have saved yourself some time and effort by not going for that patent
May 13th, 2005 at 04:49 UTC
Yeah, these have existed for a while.
As Smoot said a number of years back, the big drawback is that they’re very, very sensitive to dust.
You have to obsessively clean records because there’s no needle to push the dust out of the way, and even then, the pickup is noisy from what you missed.