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Music Media Science Hardware

Getting Groovy -- Playing Records without a Needle 43

Posted by michael from the no-skipping dept.
WillOutPower writes "The New York Times is carrying a story of two physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developing a method of recording sound from old records (remember spinning your platters on the hi-fi?) but not by playing them, instead taking a picture of them. Or more specifically the groove in the record. The Library of Congress is funding the research, which is in the nascent stages. Now maybe I can throw out that old Victrola in the attic and make room for my clunker i386 PC." We've mentioned this before.
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Getting Groovy -- Playing Records without a Needle More

Getting Groovy -- Playing Records without a Needle

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  • Their website (Score:5, Informative)

    by breon.halling ( 235909 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @11:00AM (#9073469)
    http://www-cdf.lbl.gov/~av/ [lbl.gov]
  • Is /. getting Alzheimer's?

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @11:05AM (#9073532)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:lasers (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Too right man! Taking a photo is hard, you have to line up the camera, keep it steady, press the button on the top. That's way harder than just getting a trio of lasers, building some funky electronics, and making a perfectly spinning turntable.
    • Yeah, too bad the info is record on the *sides* of the groove, not the surface and not bottom. Just taking a picture does no good.

  • Another approach (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Codger ( 96717 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @11:05AM (#9073535)
    This company [elpj.com] sells a laser turntable that plays your LPs by reading the grooves with a laser, ala CD. No contact, no wear and tear on the record. Big bucks, of course.

    The technique described in the article goes farther, though, as it apparently allows recovery of sound from records, wax cylinders, and the like, even if broken.

    • Re:Another approach (Score:4, Interesting)

      by caseih ( 160668 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @11:24AM (#9073739)
      Our university library looked into buying a couple of laser-turntables for the purpose of digitizing our vast LP collection. Turns out they are way too expensive to be reasonable right now, and also because they are so accurate they produce way too much noise (much more noise than a conventional needle). The computer scientist in me says that's okay because you can clean up the noise digitally, but in the end they chose to buy some really high-quality needle-tipped turntables.

      Someday if we can get players for old LPs that don't use a needle (either laser or image scanner with a good noise-reduction system), I think there would actually be a consumer market for them. Many of us have stacks of old LPs that we would still play if we could (without damaging them further). Many LP recordings apparently having higher-quality sound than CDs (apparently that's not hard) and quadrophonic sound.
      • I have a number of songs on both vinyl and cd (being a part time dj and all).

        The vinyl has so much more bass response, it blows any cd away. There's just something about analogue that digital can't quite reproduce. CD's tend to cutoff at about 20Hz, below which is all the stuff you 'feel' rather than hear.

        Makes a big difference.

        • Improperly mastered or Improper equipment (Score:4, Interesting)

          by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @12:16PM (#9074466) Homepage Journal
          There are two big caveats here -- While there is a high end frequency cutoff for CDDA (about 22,050Hz), there technically is not a 'low end'. However, this is not to say that CD's do not have somewhat of a problem in the low, low end. In most cases, this is either the fault of the person doing the mastering not picking up on the lower end or the machine playing the cd not bothering to reproduce it (usually the latter).

          It's very difficult to argue that buying newly released vinyl is in some way 'better' than buying a digital copy. Consider that even the new vinyl you buy was probably recorded and mastered digitally. Although this process was probably done with a higher resolution than CDDA gives you, it doesn't rule out other higher resolution digital formats (DAT, HDCD, DVD-Audio, etc.) being 'closer to the original' thn buying an analog reproduction. The analog record might still sound better than the CD to you simplay because you have better reproduction capabilities on your turntable than your cd player.

          There is also the very valid argument that you can scratch with vinyl if this is your thing and any digital recreation of that process is pretty much crap.. But it isn't an argument you mentioned :)

        • Re:Another approach (Score:2, Insightful)

          by glen604 ( 750214 )
          Actually.. Vinyl tends to be mastered with the dj in mind, so they boost the bass for club/large sound systems when it is made. It has nothing to do with whether the sound is analog or digital in origin.

          as far as bass goes- very few speakers/subs in existence can produce sound accurately down below 20hz anyway. Most party sound systems are lucky if they hit 35hz-ish with any accuracy, and generally any attempts to produce sounds lower than this just makes the speakers distort. The bass you can feel is

      • Quad sound [wendycarlos.com] probably isn't as good as you're thinking.

      • for the purpose of digitizing our vast LP collection

        Hmm. Is that legal?

    • The LOC was also the initial customer for that $100,000 machine. I can't recall if they funded the research for it, but they were definitely the target client.

  • Not the 1st. Lasers have been used for years. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ELP Laser Turntable

    http://www.elpj.com/
  • Nice, but does light make the same nice mistakes as the needle does?
  • Sounds like an improved form of this [wired.com]

  • Difference? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Erasei ( 315737 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @12:29PM (#9074610) Homepage
    Can someone with clue explain to us lay-people how what the article describes is different from what this kid did 'in a couple of late nights'? His software scans the record in using a standard flatbed scanner. Is the new version being goverment funded supposed to able to 'rip' at a better quality, or what exactly is the deal with the government funding on this?

    http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/ [huji.ac.il]
    • It seems like the process starts out with the goal to be much more than what Ofer did with his home scanner.

      The scientists even attempt to apply some techniques they learned from other experiments to have the computer clean up the sound.

      Looks like it could be very interesting to see how much of the recordings stored in the LOC can be restored.

    • Re:Difference? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by shamino0 ( 551710 )
      Can someone with clue explain to us lay-people how what the article describes is different from what this kid did 'in a couple of late nights'? His software scans the record in using a standard flatbed scanner. Is the new version being goverment funded supposed to able to 'rip' at a better quality, or what exactly is the deal with the government funding on this?

      I'm not exactly sure, but this paragraph from the NYT article implies quite a bit:

      The team shoots thousands of precise sequential images of the

  • Way, way old.

  • They are all pirates (Score:3, Funny)

    by eyeball ( 17206 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @12:49PM (#9074862) Journal
    Expect the RIAA to demand a ban on scanners shortly.
  • has this BEEN DONE BEFORE
    but it was done more then a few years ago, AND posted on /.
    and the sound quality from the photo's sucks, but it's there. but why bother with crappy sound and scanning LP's when you can get a laser turntable?
    which have been around for a lot longer then people like to think.
  • Digital scanners scan images into square, or rectangular, pixels. So, wouldn't you get a more accurate scan of those portions of the recording where the general direction of the groove was tangent to, or normal to, the direction of the scan head?

    We have all seen digital images, where some curved lines had a blobbly stair step effect. That is called aliasing. There are algorithms for anti-aliasing. But don't they lose precision?

    • I thought that was moire, and anti-aliasing was taking sharp edges (whether stair-stepped or not) and make them less sharp so as to make them pleasing to the eye?

      • Sharp horizontal or vertical lines you probably want to leave as is.

        Anti-aliasing involves adjusting the brightness of the pixels on a line with stair steps. So, instead of:

        MMM
        MMMMMMMMM
        MMMMMMMMMMMMMM

        You would get something like.

        MMMfo+-
        MMMMMMMMMfo+-
        MMMMMMMMMMMMMMfo+-

        It will work best if you stand back from the monitor a few feet. This is called "ascii art". I wanted to put more lines in my examples, but it triggered slashdot's "lameness filter". Grrrr.

  • Ahh but you can't scatch with a Photo (Score:3, Funny)

    by szyzyg ( 7313 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @02:07PM (#9075627)
    Of course, that still won't affect 90% of mainstream hip-hop cause they've long since left the live DJ behind....
  • Slashdot covered this just over two weeks ago [slashdot.org].
  • Any1 else remember cheesy 70s SciFi with rubbermen holding an LP/Cassette up to their ears and pretending to hear the music. Adapted in the 80s to CDs but the same principal.

    Maybe they had a scanning laser embedded in their skull transferring the sound directly to the inner ear through the bone.

    Remember guys pressing their forearms to a book to read it?

    Could happen. Wouldn't be the first time cheesy SciFi foretells the future.

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