A laser turntable (or optical turntable) is a phonograph that uses laser beams (similar to a Compact Disc player) as the pickup to play LP gramophone records instead of a stylus (as in a conventional turntables).
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William K. Heine presented a paper entitled A Laser Scanning Phonograph Record Player to the 57th Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention in May 1977. 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. In development since 1972, the working prototype was named the "LASERPHONE" and the methods it used for playback was awarded U.S. Patent 3,992,593 on November 16, 1976[1]. Heine concluded in his paper that he hoped his work would increase interest in using lasers for phonographic playback.
Four years later Robert S. Reis, a graduate student in engineering at Stanford University, wrote his master's thesis on "An Optical Turntable" [2]. 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. In 1984 servo-control expert Robert N. Stark joined the effort[3].
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 first working model, the Finial LT-1 (Laser Turntable-1), was completed in time for the 1986 CES. The prototype had an interesting flaw: it was so accurate that it played every particle of dirt and dust on the record, rather than pushing them aside as a conventional stylus would. The non-contact laser pickup did have the advantages of eliminating tracking noise, turntable rumble, feedback from speakers and record wear. The projected $2500 street price (later raised to $3786 in 1988) limited the potential market to professionals (libraries, radio stations and archivists) and a few well-heeled audiophiles[4].
Unfortunately for Finial, this period of development coincided with both a major economic recession and the perfection and introduction of the Digital Compact Disc, which began flooding the market at prices comparable to LPs (with CD players in the $300 range). Vinyl record sales plummeted, and many turntable manufacturers failed as a result.
The Finial turntable never went into production. After a few hand-built (and finicky)[5] prototypes were completed and shown, tooling delays, component unavailability (in the days before cheap lasers), marketing blunders, and high development costs kept pushing back the release date. With over US$20 million in venture capital invested, Finial was faced with a Morton's fork: to forge ahead with a selling price that was too high for most consumers, or to gamble on going into mass production at a much lower price and hoping the market would lower costs.
In late 1989 Finial's investors finally cut their losses and liquidated the firm, selling the patents to Japanese turntable maker BSR, which became CTI Japan which in turn created ELP Japan for continued development of the "super-audiophile" turntable. After eight more years of development the laser turntable was finally put on sale in 1997 as the ELP LT-1XA Laser Turntable, with a list price of US$20,500 (in 2003 the price was halved to US$10,500)[6].
A completely separate technology[7] has been developed by physicist Carl Haber. Installed in the Library of Congress late in 2006, the IRENE System uses a two-dimensional camera rotating around the record, which takes detailed photographs of the grooves. Software then uses the digital images to reconstruct the sound. IRENE often produces a large amount of hiss with the recording, but it is very capable of removing pops and clicks produced by scratches on the record surface. IRENE will only read lateral information (monophonic), but a three-dimensional scanner project is underway that will handle stereophonic and quadraphonic records, in addition to historical hill-and-dale recordings.[8] Detailed descriptive posters can be downloaded from the IRENE Web site. These are not being developed for sale.
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