IRENE (technology)

The technology was developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev and was announced in a publication of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society in 2003.

[1] It grew out of Haber's research in particle physics; in the 1990s, he had worked on Higgs boson detection experiments, and realized that the cameras he was using to set the detectors could also be used for detailed imaging of grooved audio recordings.

[3] By 2005, Haber and Fadeyev had developed two-dimensional and three-dimensional machines, capable of recovering audio from vertically-cut and laterally-cut grooved media.

[7] As of 2020[update], IRENE machines are operated by three institutions – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Library of Congress,[3] and the Northeast Document Conservation Center.

[1] It also allows for the reconstruction of already broken or damaged media such as cracked cylinders or delaminating lacquer discs, which cannot be played with a stylus.