I have recorded all my vinyl at 96/24 and it does sound fabulous. Probably the same as @Marian points out. So to get the best sound and preserve the vinyl, buy it, record it and play that as it sounds much better than the CD.
Having said that I still play my vinyl as it’s an experience I enjoy and really aren’t ar5ed what anyone else thinks or says.
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Well I’ve spent the last 7hrs spinning discs, loved it and sorry I don’t feel it’s compromised listening in any way. Most of them I prefer the vinyl mastering over the cd when I have both. And the youngest of these was 7 years old, one nearly as old as me and sounds fabulous still most about 30 -35 years old. Look after them they look after you.
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I’m a little surprised no one has come out with a no-touch cartridge. A couple LEDs for structured light, and a tiny video camera tracking the groove. I suppose the tone arm would also have to be motorized to follow the groove.
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It’s been done.
The laser systems of 40 years ago were never actually produced. IRENE is probably the closest to what I was thinking of, but it’s really a digitization system, intended to “rip” a record or wax cylinder. I was thinking of a drop-in replacement for a phono cartridge, but I don’t really see how it could track the groove without riding in it.
I came across this which seems to be in production?
Like you said, I’ve never heard of an “optical cartridge” that could be installed on a standard turntable.
Reading the article I linked it was interesting about how the laser would read every spec of dust/debris, which could make it sound a bit noisy, or “crunchy” as mentioned in the article.
Those work only with black records BTW.
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There are optical cartridges by DS audio
Yeah but they use a stylus, just without a coil and magnet
Half way house
Sure, but the original question was about no-touch
At work so only had quick glance at thread ,didn’t notice that but saw mention about laser that’s all
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It’s an interesting solution and addition to the thread anyway
Wikipedia writes: "In a 2008 review of the model ELP LT-1LRC, Jonathan Valin in The Absolute Sound claimed “If I were to describe its presentation in a few words, they would be “pleasant but dull.”” He commended the tonal accuracy of playback, but criticized the lack of dynamic range and bass response (limitations of the vinyl records themselves). Records must be wet-cleaned immediately before playback because, says Valin, “Unlike a relatively massive diamond stylus, which plows through a record’s grooves like the prow of a ship, the ELP’s tiny laser-beam styli have next to no mass [sic] and cannot move dust particles out of their way. Any speck of dirt, however minute, is read by the lasers along with the music.” Michael Fremer, writing in Stereophile in 2003 noted, “…consider the LT’s many pluses: no rumble or background noise of any kind; no cartridge-induced resonances or frequency-response anomalies; no compromise in channel separation (the ELP guarantees channel separation in excess of what the best cutter heads offer); zero tracking or tracing error; no inner-groove distortion; no skating; no adjustments of VTA or azimuth to worry about; no tangency error (like the cutter head itself, the laser pickup is a linear tracker); no record wear; a claimed frequency response of 10Hz–25kHz; and, because the laser beam is less than a quarter the contact area of the smallest elliptical stylus, it can negotiate sections of the engraved waveform that even the smallest stylus misses.” But, he notes, all this comes at a cost: “[T]he LT-2XRC’s laser pickup was unable to distinguish groove modulations from dirt. Records that sound dead quiet on a conventional turntable could sound as if I was munching potato chips while listening to the ELP. Bummer. There’s a solution, of course: a record-cleaning machine. This can’t be considered an “accessory” with the LT: it’s mandatory. Even new records fresh out of the jacket can sound crunchy.”[18] He concludes, “Ironically, if you listen to the music itself, you won’t know you’re listening to an LP. It’s almost like a reel-to-reel tape. Unfortunately, when there is noise, it will always make you aware that you’re listening to an LP. That’s the confounding thing about this fabulous contraption.”
That’s a long time ago, though, and maybe today it would be possible to improve on this with better algorithms and computing hardware
Exactly. A long time ago, both in computational abilities and video processing. And it never went anywhere because people lost interest in vinyl about that time. Lasers! Pah! Old tech.
But with the rebirth of interest in vinyl, modern technology, including neural networks, could just see the grooves, and distinguish the dirt.
Actually, if we toss in transformer technology, we might do even better. Train up the LLM (actually a LMM) on oodles of music instead of words. Have it continually predicting what the next sample should look like. Pops and scratches would just fall out of range.
Or make a digital record read by laser, since digital is virtually immune to this stuff. Something like a CD.
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Yeah I agree, once one arrives at this point it’s easier to just have a digital carrier to begin with
This is a funny turn to this discussion. I was thinking about turntable technology as I watched the US Open tennis. I thought why couldn’t we use similar camera technology that’s used to make line calls at in tennis to read the groove of a record, interpolate the nature of the waveform in order to remove obstructions (dust and scratches), then reconstruct the waveform for playback minus the glitches. Then I realized this could only be accomplished digitally, so why not just play a file. Doh!
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Great point: The fun factor should not be minimized. Going to a record store, reading liner notes and arguably even the time of the day that you play your albums can contribute to the fun experience.
Nothing has replaced the fun of going to Tower Records and going through the bins.
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