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The laser turntable

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I am not impressed! Over 10 years and 2 corporate owners and no US trained people to repair or align it. It sounds like a CD with excessive noise reduction on near perfect records. And requires machine cleaned records and declicking to play. No attitude intended. Too many issues for most of us. I'd rather have a modern severely high end conventional machine repairable without shipping it to Japan. And a good RCM. For the shipping alone back to Japan, there's a lot of very nice high end tables and tonearms you can buy.
 
I've known about the laser turntable since the late 1980's from those DAK catalogs my late father had. It's a great idea but for the price? No way. Might as well by the cd.
 
HI All,
Laser turntables have been used by the Smithsonian to archive vinyl records. I don't know if they still are.

Sparky
 
Yes, for very specific purposes. Like cracked or damaged records playable by no other means. Usually, the Library Of Congress/Smithsonian uses Technics SP 10 Mk II or SP 15 turntables with transcription tonearms a la SME and Stanton 500 or 680 series cartridges with custom styli for most archival and transcription duties.
 
illini said:
I've known about the laser turntable since the late 1980's from those DAK catalogs my late father had. It's a great idea but for the price? No way. Might as well by the cd.
Click to expand...

That DAK unit was probably ADC Accutrack overstock which was a player that used a mini-laser at the cartridge for selection track-finding rather than track playing in place of a stylus. Only the U.S.-made Finial player of that time (which later became the Japanese-made ELP) was a true laser tracking/tracing player.
 
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Been discussed numerous times here on AK, comes up probably 3-4 times a year. Too expensive, too sensitive to scratches and groove contamination (i.e. "dirt"), with too little tangible benefit, it's a solution in search of a problem.
 
Yep, what KT sed for specific archiving. Just too easy and much cheaper to get good performance from a much simpler TT set-up.
 
-Cold Eythl-

What of the newer models with options. Have they made any real improvements over the orginal.
It seems like and interesting idea. Just far to expensive and limited. Due to Dust, warps and color of disc. I would getting. LT table before with track read options before I got aything like this.
 
Something possessed me to Google this today as the concept always fascinated me. These are now being sold in the USA on Ebay (!) by a seller named cheapgamestuff. The lower-price model (no RIAA) is $8,500; the deluxe with RIAA is $16,000. I wish some high-power manufacturer had taken up this technology but I guess it will always be kind of a sad story.
 
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