Laser turntable

[1] The paper details a method developed by Heine that employs a single 2.2 mW helium–neon laser for both tracking a record groove and reproducing the stereo audio of a phonograph in real time.

[3] In 1983 he and fellow Stanford electrical engineer Robert E. Stoddard founded Finial Technology to develop and market a laser turntable, raising $7 million in venture capital.

[4][5] A non-functioning mock-up of the proposed Finial turntable was shown at the 1984 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), generating much interest and a fair amount of mystery, since the patents had not yet been granted and the details had to be kept secret.

The prototype revealed an interesting flaw of laser turntables: they are so accurate that they "play" every particle of dirt and dust on the record, instead of pushing them aside as a conventional stylus would.

After Finial showed a few hand-built (and finicky)[8] prototypes, tooling delays, component unavailability (in the days before cheap lasers), marketing blunders, and high development costs kept pushing back the release date.

The long development of the laser turntable exactly coincided with two major events, the early 1980s recession, and the introduction of the Digital Compact Disc, which soon began flooding the market at prices comparable to LPs (with CD players in the $300 range).

[10] ELP sells built-to-order laser turntables directly to consumers in two versions (LT-basic, and LT-master),[11] at a reported cost (unpublished) of approximately $16,000 for the basic model.

[12] In May 2018, Almedio of Japan, a computer drive manufacturer,[13] presented the Optora ORP-1 optical (laser) turntable at the HIGH END Munich audio show.

"[19] In 2008, Michael Fremer noted in Stereophile: "...consider the LT's many pluses: no rumble or background noise of any kind; no cartridge-induced resonances or frequency-response anomalies; no compromise in channel separation (the ELP guarantees channel separation in excess of what the best cutter heads offer); zero tracking or tracing error; no inner-groove distortion; no skating; no adjustments of VTA or azimuth to worry about; no tangency error (like the cutter head itself, the laser pickup is a linear tracker); no record wear; a claimed frequency response of 10Hz–25kHz; and, because the laser beam is less than a quarter the contact area of the smallest elliptical stylus, it can negotiate sections of the engraved waveform that even the smallest stylus misses.