New technology is being used to read the grooves of a record album optically, using digital imagery, rather than mechanically with a needle. Much hullabaloo is on Metafilter about it (most of which is about unrelated specious claims of sound recorded in ancient pottery), but I remember, at least since my high-school years, laser-reading record players have been on the market. They're still quite spendy, and are supposedly foiled by damaged or dirty discs. With all the history of various capacitance and electromechanical methods have been used in recording -- without analyzing what's being taken in, just converting -- I wonder why the optical method is such a big deal. I suppose there's a difference in visual noise that might be more filterable than audio. I, personally, would think a high-rotatation record player, taking multiple samples of the same spot optically, or some other way (air pressure, radar, who knows), would be real-time playable and with reduced noise, as opposed to post-processing a microscope scan. (update: more extremely nerdy info
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