The Laser Turntable

Oh, they're still called glass. Glass was used during WWII when aluminum was in short supply. Sadly, that means few of them remain in one piece. A laser turntable will not play them, as the nitrate coating isn't reflective enough for a laser to track. The stylus you'll need will be from 2.5 to 3.0 mil, generally, and truncated elliptical is usually (but not always) the best profile. Aluminum discs were actual aluminum, uncoated, with just a very shallow scribing of the groove. Sound quality is rather poor.

Here is a website that will tell you tons about restoring 78's. http://www.78rpmrestorations.com/ Lots of useful information.

 

This might be a strange question to some but here goes...

Is there a cartridge/stylus out there that sounds like the Laser Turntable? I love the Laser Turntable sound but can't stand the annoying noise due to dust etc and my conventional turntables can't reproduce the sound the Laser Turntable gives out.

 

I doubt it. I'd imagine a lot of its sound has to do with the fact the laser beam is massless.

Might also have to do with the fact it's a linear tracking "tonearm".

 

Has your player arrived yet? What are your impressions?

 

The player arrive and first impressions was as long as the record was super clean it was as good a quality to my Clearaudio setup.As a player it is a big plastic box and in less then a week the player locked up and would not open.After been told it has to go back to Japan for repair, I no longer wanted anything to do with it.Getting a full refund is taking its time.I would recommend using paypal so if it breaks down within 45 days you have a chance of getting a refund!
Stump

 

DS-W1 OPTICAL CARTRIDGE

This may fit the bill!!
I read it was similar to the Clearaudio Goldfinger Cart..

http://www.musicalsurroundings.com/product/dsw1/

 

AHHHHHH!!!!!! It locked up within a week? At that price? I would be furious, uncontrollable.

 

At first I was furious BUT then to be told we don't give refunds I was uncontrollable...
Stump

 

Ohhhh...we don't give refunds for our products which do not work? Murder in my heart. Truly.

 

What warranty, if any, do they put in writing?

 

Is the laser "upgradeable", like a cart?

 

I thought if a new item was faulty, you were legally entitled to a refund.

 

I don't know about that but I doubt it. I think that their cheapest model used to employ 3 lasers. I think that all their units use 5 lasers presently.

 

If you put it on a credit card, I wouldn't even try to resolve it with the dealer. Just let your card company handle it. Believe me, they will get your money back.

 

Did you manage to get a refund at least through the credit card company?

 

After going ballistic at the thought of a legal battle with a Japanese Company I came to a agreement with the owner of the Company to X5 monthly repayments with the last payment made 2 weeks ago.I may have just received an unlucky machine which went faulty BUT I did expect to get 10 years of trouble free use before sending back to Japan for a service.
Stump

 

The company had to put you on a payment plan to pay you back? Wow.

 

You had unrealistic or wrong expectations. From everything I've read, if used heavily they need the lasers re-aligned every few years. I thought that maybe, just maybe the company was about to turn a corner when they made Smart Electronics in Atlanta their North American service centre. That didn't last long! The company is so small that they, apparently, couldn't function without service revenue. The guy who runs the company is obviously a talented technician but a horible marketer and businessman. Payment plans for refunds.... Sad!

 

And you can hear samples of what it sounds like--of course, they won't sound exactly like the actual playback but they should give you an idea if you are familiar with the particular albums:

http://www.musicalsurroundings.com/audio-samples/

 

ELP is a company I never felt like I could fully trust either. No USA service facility, no desire for one. And this very thing quoted seems to reinforce my initial suspicions.

 

no offense, the laser turntable is a dumb idea. a solution in search of a problem.

 

The problem is record wear.

 

Couldn't disagree more. Physical contact pickups of an amplitude-modulated signal like that encoded on vinyl have all sorts of terrible issues which can be resolved by a massless pickup.

I just don't think the current laser turntable is that great a solution, given modern technology. I'm pretty sure you could do much better today in the digital realm using a tiny digital-imaging microscope and software to convert the resulting images of the groove into sound. In fact, I'm kinda surprised nobody has produced such a gadget yet, because the cost (thanks to the mass-production of high-quality, tiny image sensors for the cell phone market) is plummeting by the day.

 

Record wear is not a problem. it has been established that on a properly aligned/adjusted system, wear is negligible. And, records are just copies of the original. There are many of most releases. If a given copy wears out, it is no big deal.

As for the physical contact of the pickup causing problems, that has already been solved. Making a massless pickup for LP playback is silly as there are already other formats that work just fine, aka digital.

 

I'm sorry, but that has never been - and can never be - "solved" by a pickup that relies on physical contact. You're always going to have issues with resonances, tracking and so forth.