[Jukebox-list] laser vinyl players

[Doug Duncan]

Jukebox Jimmy wrote:
> Earlier this year, I ran across a website by the Lawrence Berkeley Lab Optical Sound Restoration System.  Don't ask me HOW I ran across it, probably just following links across the net as I like to do ;-)
>
> Anyway, I downloaded a QuickTime movie of their "project" - and what an interesting project it is!  They set up a laser player to read old cylinder records - many old cylinder records can't even be played once, as they will crumble, many have mold, etc. and so this team decided to see if they could "play" one with a laser!  The movie is fascinating!
>   
The url is here

http://www.lbl.gov/Tech-Transfer/publications/1855opt_sound.mov

I listened to this on a pair of big monitors and I agree that the sound 
quality is impressive. You really would not believe that such a quality 
could be extracted from a cylinder without loss of content. I'm sure 
that there will be many of us out there who would love to play with that.

But the sound is not extracted in realtime and the high powered software 
behind the laser is the exceptional technology.

In some respects the other 2 dimensional process they showed was more 
impressive because it optically scans a flattish disc , stitches the 
image scans together and, you assume, uses the same pattern recognition 
to decide what part of the image is sound and what debris or damage. You 
could almost imagine trying this at home!

I really look forward to hearing some of the LOC recordings cleaned up 
by this method.

Doug