HD "HI-FI Vinyl Will Soon Be A Reality 3D Printing Technology

Yes, but Laserdisc is a non-starter. The discs are ENORMOUS and expensive to manufacture and the equipment to make both the discs and the players is all in mothballs at best, more likely long destroyed.

An analog Blu-ray on the other hand should be able to use much of the existing tech and facilities used to manufacture standard Blu-ray discs and players. Not that I think this is terribly likely to happen, but it's technically feasible without spending a quadrillion dollars reinventing the wheel (or trying to resurrect long-dead tech).

If the analog fetishists were serious though, this is exactly what they'd be clamouring for...

 

I wonder when we will see the first album in this format and if Rega will support it?

 

I'd rather see high precision laser scanning, software mapping and sophisticated repair techniques, to create brand new stampers for classic analogue LP cuts (i.e. Rob Ludwig’s Led Zep II). Perhaps an audiophile label could start an on demand service if technology made it feasible in the near future to create exact (or improved, if pressing imperfections etc. could be carefully zoomed in & removed from the 3D scans prior to the stamper beimg created) duplicates from vinyl’s heyday. I’m sure this tech. already exists, but God knows how pricey it would be to initially setup.
...just dreaming aloud here

 

Not any more enormous than a standard 12" LP record. And now they're releasing some BluRays in LaserDisc jackets, for those who prefer the big artwork:

 

Laserdiscs are far more massive than any LP record. The things weighed a ton and needed a massive motor to spin them.

 

True, but it was originally a 100% analogue technology and the best that could be done back in the 70's.

 

The "sweet sound of vinyl" is an amalgam of many flavors, not the least of which is the signal chain of the cutting head. If you laser-cut the album, you can kiss the goodness of those final tube amps goodbye, making albums sound a bit "sterile".

 

And to go along with your 3D-printed vinyl records, you can use a 3D-printed turntable:

 

Uh, no.

 

No audio format using Blu-Ray please. HDMI only on many players offends most two channel purists, who buy vintage gear or from companies who don't make A/V Gear. Plus we don't need obnoxious HDCP which lets us not have choices of DAC or output options save for a few players. MPAA needs to stick to Hollywood movies. And Blu-Ray is digital and no analog options. Want analog, it's there, it is called open reel and cassette tapes, or vinyl discs. It works just fine, it's plenty good.

 

I guess this 12" analog laserdisc v.2 means big studios with analog recording will be making a comeback, right?

 

How dare they invent something new!
(says the guy wearing 3-D printed glasses)

 

Yeah, but analogue purists don't know this. They could introduce a tube-sound processor before cutting.

 

Digital Bluray audio exists today. @sunspot42 was talking about a hypothetical analogue audio format on optical disks who would have the same size and laser mechanism as current Bluray, but everything else would have to be different. Its only output would have to be an analogue RCA pair, no HDMI, no HDCP and no DAC.

A hypothetical laser-read analogue format would be better than any of those. If analogue purists were rational, they would demand that instead of refining the outdated vinyl process.

 

And still Blu-Ray and all of the current lasers and transports are as a rule, flimsy and short lived. For that to fly, how about a transport built to last, that's worth buying. How about somebody making a transport as durable and reliable as a CDM-1. Vinyl is not outdated. Your disposable laser disc methods are outdated and landfill too quickly. Until somebody makes one that lasts. why? My turntables have outlasted countless CD and other laser based disposable players. My open reel machines have also outlasted many a laser based anything. For the kind of durability modern CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray lasers have, the industry needs to make me something which is not JUNK!

 

Really? I've never had one break. Anyhow, who cares - they'd still be vastly cheaper than a decent turntable/cartridge/preamp combo, and offer far superior performance. I'd imagine you could near-perfectly reproduce any analog studio tape ever made, at least in two channels, given the available bandwidth of the format.

 

Name me a Blu-Ray transport which will be working after more than 10,000 hours of use, and you might be on to something. Modern day laser transports are getting more and more disposable, rather than getting better. Denon professional new CD players do well to last 3-4 years maximum of heavy broadcast use, many of them down after barely better than 28 months of use.

 

No idea what the rated lifespan on these things are these days, but I'd guess quite a few would make it to 10,000 and some would sail far, far beyond. And anyhow, you could presumably make one that would blow any turntable combo out of the water for $500 - roughly the price of a fairly high-quality cartridge. So consider them disposable and replace them every 5 years or whatever (which many audiophiles do with their entire vinyl setups, anyhow).

Also, the discs would last essentially forever and not be plagued by all the ridiculous pressing errors we see literally nonstop carping about all over this forum.

 

I'd like to see the effects of a fingerprint or some scratches on this hypothetical analog Blu ray. Keep two things in mind, with analog there's no error correction, and if you use Blu ray technology which has smaller tracks than the ones on CD the effects of fingerprints, scratches or dirt will be more noticiable. I also think a CD reflects more laser light than a Blu ray Disc and I think this would make an impact on signal to noise ratio. An analog CD or DVD replicated using Blu ray Disc tech (Durabys hard coating for the read side for example) makes more sense to me IMO.

 

Dust and fingerprints weren't much of an issue for Laserdisc, and we've come a LONG way in terms of adaptive optics. I wouldn't be surprised if there was enough space on a Blu-ray to record everything twice and use digital techniques to determine - on a track by track basis - which copy is cleanest and then select that one for output.

Signal to noise ratio is determined by bandwidth, not by the amount of laser light reflected. Blu-ray discs have a staggering amount of bandwidth available to them, especially if you go multi-layer. They wouldn't encode the signal as amplitude modulation - it would likely be an FM signal of some sort, as with Laserdisc and VHS and Beta Hi-Fi years ago. Think an FM radio with the performance of a high-end analog studio tape recorder.

 

You know what else has the performance of a high-end analog tape recorder? A high-end analog tape recorder. Let's bring back Elcaset! It just got its first ever commercially released album on the format:

Elcaset first official Pre-Recorded commercial release Jeremy Heiden Blue Wicked | eBay

 

Ha! I saw that. But it's kinda redundant - a good metal cassette with Dolby S is gonna sound about the same.

That would be even easier to bring back than Elcaset or than creating some new analog, Blu-ray derived format. Both stomp all over vinyl in most regards.

Come to think of it, with modern manufacturing techniques I wonder if you couldn't vastly improve on the traditional cassette tape head. Thin film technologies and all that stuff, like the technique used to manufacture the read/write heads in modern hard drives, and modern evaporated metal tape formulations.

 

One problem is that according to what I've heard, nobody makes Dolby NR decoding chips anymore. That's why no cassette decks in production today have it, not even a $400 Tascam.

We could implement Dolby decoding in DSP, but then it wouldn't be a fully analog device. Or we could hope for someone to restart production of the Dolby chips -- or a good clone of them, like JVC's ANRS was.

 

Plus nobody makes new metal oxide tape either

 

Dolby Laboratories won't allow this to be done. DSP is not going to be able to be adjusted either.