Laser Turntable

I landed on this product web site through the Random Yahoo Link. This “laser turntable” presents an interesting solution to hearing and enjoying aging LP record collections without jeopardizing their surface.

At a cost of $10,990 US I do not anticipate adding the ELP Laser Turntable to my personal arsenal of audio archiving tools. It seems, however, like an interesting sounding product for libraries, archivists and LP collectors with money to burn.

The company web site lists pianist Keith Jarrett as a happy customer, but offers no sound samples of this interesting device designed to reproduce the superior sound quality of LP records while preserving their physical state. I would like to hear how this device plows through scratches and surface blemishes of older LP records. There appears to be no way to use this handsome device to digitize old LPs. While one who is ready to spend this much money for a record player that exists to preserve the quality of their records might not be the sort who intends to turn their LPs into FLAC files I would nevertheless expect such an option.

Some time ago I began a side project of archiving my old cassette tapes. I have bags filled with tapes from my Panasonic answering machines and from various telephone related projects of mine. I mentioned this project to some friends and was surprised to find how interested people were in my little endeavor. Most folks I talked to seemed to think that digitizing cassettes saves them from oblivion, preserving them for eternity in a format less susceptible to decay and obsolescence. I disagree. Digital content is far more susceptible to complete destruction than any of its analog cousins. Preserving something digitally immediately puts it in a certain state of limbo, a state where no amount of backup or redundancy will ever guarantee that it will exist tomorrow, a state in which none can reasonably expect it to last as long as those old cassettes themselves. Some of my cassettes date back 25 years. I do not expect that my digitized versions of them will last as long.