Vinyl Laser Turntable

[Roman Efimov]

From: ro...@zipper.paco.net (Roman Efimov)
Reply-To: ro...@zipper.paco.net

The ELP Laser Turntable (LT) Story

Reproducing phonograph records without physical contact has been a
dream in the music and audio world for more than 60 years, as soon as
it was realized that a stylus touching a moving disc creates
substantial immediate and permanent damage to the musical information
stored on that disc.

An American graduate student, Robert E. Stoddard made a theoretical
analysis of the feasibility and concluded that the dream could, in
fact, be realized. While in graduate school at Stanford University, he
proved that the musical information on analog records could be
retrieved optically. None of his colleagues, nor his professor,
believed that this theoretical analysis could be converted into a
practical machine.

Upon graduation in 1983, Mr. Stoddard established Finial Technology,
Inc., in California and started development of an optical turntable to
prove the theory. Several very able engineers with skills in laser
optics, high speed servo systems, analog signal processing and high
precision mechanical systems joined Mr. Stoddard in his quest to
fulfill the audio lover's dream. It did in fact prove more difficult
to build a machine than the graduate student's theory, but after seven
years of effort and almost 20 million dollars of investment, Mr.
Stoddard succeeded in the basic development. There is little doubt
that this remarkable achievement was only possible in the United
States, where such applications of cutting edge technologies are
respected and supported by private investors.

One example of the devotion shown to the project is the development of
critical components for the Laser Turntable. Of course, no critical
components were available "off the shelf." The optical scanner
required was of such a high performance level that the only ones
available were military class devices. Mr. Stoddard's team worked for
18 months to develop a custom high performance scanner (patent
pending) for the optical turntable.

Although the Finial team completed the development of the Laser
Turntable, the team lacked the experience and the financial resources
to go into production. To move into production, the Finial team
contacted major Japanese audio product manufacturers to form a joint
venture, but these companies had a much greater interest in promoting
Compact Disc technology and showed no real interest in preservation of
our heritage of music stored on vinyl discs.

It is our belief at ELP Corporation that phonographic recording is a
culture in and of itself, which should not be allowed to become
extinct. We believe that one of the objectives of new technologies
should be to preserve that which is worth preserving, and in this
case, we believe that the vast heritage of music (and other
historically important recordings) on vinyl discs are definitely worth
preservation for future generations. With this firm conviction in
mind, we invited Stoddard and his engineers to join our team in 1989,
and investigated ways to put the Laser Turntable on the market.

One of the first subjects was to see if the turntable could be
drastically lowered in cost by means of automated production
technology. We came to the conclusion that it would be very difficult
to achieve this because of the wide variety of forms of records
produced over the history of more than a century of the phonograph.
Above all, these records were only meant to be played by a mechanical
stylus and, therefore, variations in quality of records that were
within the tolerance of stylus technology were disregarded during the
manufacture of records. If we had pursued the vision of a low cost
turntable that could reproduce sound from a wide variety of records,
the LT would never have seen the light of day

We ultimately decided to simply review and improve the basic design of
the original Finial Turntable with an emphasis on three points:
1. Improvement of quality and reliability.
2. Development of new functionality to extend the range of types of
records the turntable would play.
3. Establishment of facilities and processes to build very high
quality turntables by hand.

This took another two years.

The Laser Turntable is now available to you after ten years of
dedication and struggle. It is a product of dream and enthusiasm,
co-developed by the teams in the US and Japan. In a land where mass
production is the norm, the way we build Laser Turntables is heresy,
but we are determined to respond to audio collectors throughout the
world by hand-making each Laser Turntable with passion and confidence.
.



-Sanju Chiba
President, ELP Corporation
--
With best regards,
Roman Efimov

ro...@paco.net
ro...@rtl.odessa.ua