Been thinking on this for a while

[Nic-15fl]

Not sure if its the right forum part im placeing it in, but i had been thinking on building a little laser setup for my turntable just for fun to transfer over the records with, but i dont really have parts on my own to really do it and have 1 end on the platter and then use the speed from the platter to drive the laser along the record with and output the audio to my amp, i was mostly thinking my mono records since those wil be easy, stereo would be a little more difficult.

[dseymo1]

It's been done before professionally, but it's far from trivial!
The most obvious issues are tracking and avoiding dust (a conventional stylus sweeps much of the dirt and dust out of the way when playing).
Good luck!

[Nic-15fl]

I am clearly aware of the ELP but i was more thinking on a more low cost basis, i was wondering on asking somebody could build it for me.

[Nickthedentist]

Hello,

This would make an interesting project if you had the time and the knowledge, but the results might well be inferior to a conventional turntable costing just a few £ secondhand.

Most of the "fun" would be in designing and building it.

Unless you are very rich, I think it's unlikely someone would build one for you.

Nick.

[Nuvistor]

This post from David, Radio Wrangler covers some interesting points, post 6 and 7 and as usual from David, the whole thread is very interesting and well worth a read.

https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...d.php?p=746624

Frank

[Nic-15fl]

i was just thinking at first asking out here in the forum for the needed part's, it was inspired by electronman32k's edison cylinder player that he is building, it wanted to make that work for my 78's.

Oh yes it can be done, it will need some mechanics to 'read' the tracks and some serious DSP (digital signal processing) to get even a reasonable audio signal. I wouldn't quote less than two months work to get it to work at all. At todays rates it would be very costly, somewhere in the region of 10k! Being pragmatic, buy a CD of the record.

[Nic-15fl]

I was thinking that the laser from a cd player can be used to read the grooves of the record.

[PsychMan]

Its an interesting thought, but I wouldn't expect anything other than sub par results, if it even worked at all!

Records were designed and mastered to be played with a turntable, I cant see how you can get a better delivery mechanism than that, or why you would want to unless as an engineering experiment.

I recall a student wrote some code that could allow a scanned high depth image of a record to be read by software and played back. It didn't sound very good at all, but was impressive as a piece of engineering

[dominicbeesley]

If they are rare records you really don't want to play them with a stylus that they were designed for as they are expensive to keep sharp and take some of the life out of the record each time you play it. An optical solution has many advantages not least of which is that it should not damage the record!

I was thinking along similar lines a while ago but I decided that a better idea would be to look at the optics and controller in an optical mouse. I've no idea if they would be fast enough, however if you are wanting this to transcribe recordings to CD then it might be a goer as you could run the disc at a slow rate...

[G6Tanuki]

Many years ago I conjectured using a digital microscope to take many photos of a vinyl or shellac record as it was rotated, then using one of the software packages used to analyse digital terrain photography to reconstitute the results into a single 'flying-down-a-canyon' topological/elevation stream - which could then be passed through a D/A converter to recover the audio.

Sounds like the sort of thing a first-year student undergrad could be given as a project.

[dave cox]

Food for thought ...

dc

Having a think...

The limiting resolution of a record/stylus system would be about the size of an atom, say carbon for example, is 70pm, light 700nm (red) that's 10,000 times difference, no wonder optical systems are not as good for this application.

More, the wiggle of a record groove is about 70um i.e. about one million to one compared with a carbon atom. That's 60 dB not a bad approximation to the real world.

[dave cox]

A visible laser is too long a wavelength to challenge a stylus. However a non contact atomic force microscope could do much better

dc

[trickie_dickie]

I'm thinking......Flight Simulator.......Linear Tracking.......Video Camera.......Software = Audio output.