Aug 31 2007Laser Record Player
If you've got $14,000 to throw around and really love your vinyl, then maybe the ELP Laser Turntable is for you.
Instead of a needle dropping down on your stacks of wax, four lasers read the reflections of your records' grooves, while a fifth tracks each record's warp to keep the reading beams' height constant. The result is more accurate sound reproduction than a traditional stylus produces, with all the warmth that purists crave, minus the wear and tear on the record.
This is great, but $14,000? Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of dropping the needle on a Barry Manilow album and watching the clothes melt off beautiful women, but for that kind of money I'd rather huff a truckload of model airplane glue and play with myself.
PC World [thanks to the unbelievably gorgeous Beth for the tip]
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Reader Comments
1. Ll - August 31, 2007 11:05 AM
First - and this is Laser Turntable looks like crap.
2. Sharona - August 31, 2007 11:06 AM
I love my music as well but this is too much!
3. Lamellama - August 31, 2007 1:09 PM
I have something like this except its smaller and cheaper, its called a "CD" player
4. jo - August 31, 2007 2:31 PM
$14,000 today, $2,000 in 2012?
5. uruwai - August 31, 2007 3:31 PM
but, can you do some old skool scratching on it?
hmmm...
nice try, but no thanks.
6. dentaku - August 31, 2007 7:05 PM
No scratching, and unless it has changed recently it only plays black colored vinyl, no pictured discs or colored vinyl. I think you are better off with an SME turntable if you are going to spend that much.
7. Commodore Pabst - September 1, 2007 1:12 AM
this is the device that will be my undoing
8. Tenchi059 - September 1, 2007 5:36 AM
Cool, but I won't spend $14,000 on something that seems a sad, original item from the 80's...
9. em - September 1, 2007 6:21 AM
hardly cutting edge design. it couldn't get much clunkier.
10. nibiru-x - September 2, 2007 1:35 PM
Ahhh yes! I've actually heard one! A friend of mine owns one. It's way better sounding than CD crap, I can assure you! Not cosmetically brilliant, I'll admit, but I make my judgement based on sound, not looks. I suppose many of you think that a $500 Casio "wally-box" is as good as a $250,000 Steinway grand piano as well. Good luck with your iPods!
11. Bo Babbyo - September 2, 2007 2:27 PM
. . . .sad, original item from the 80's...
From what I understand, this is closer to the truth that one might realize.
The story is that current CD technology began with laser LP (vinyl) turntables. It was very easy to use lasers to read LP grooves. SO easy, in fact, that the lab-rats started realizing that using vinyl LPs as a source of music for laser readers was hugely inefficient. They started looking at digital music sources and that's how we ended up with digital CDs.
So laser LP player technology has been around for thirty years or so. I gather the reason laser LP players are so expensive now is because they are not being turned out in their thousands in China
12. marc f - March 15, 2008 12:38 AM
I sadly discovered that kids don't appreciate quality, to convince a grown up to go back to vinyl records is easy, but to convince a kid is more than a challenge, it's almost like trying to stop them from eating at Mc Donald's.
If everyone out there took the time to compare the quality of vinyl records and cd's, and if they had an excellent ear, then they'll realize that vinyls are the highest quality one can achieve in audio and that's the first step.
I took that step and had to get rid of my CD's.
Second step is to get a player that preserves them.
I will take that stop soon.
13. JEFF DICK - February 17, 2009 12:59 PM
WHAT PEOPLE DON'T REALIZE ABOUT SOUND IS TO REPRODUCE IT: IT HAS TO BE SYNTHESIZED. ANY OTHER FORM IS NOT IT'S NATURAL STATE OR CLARITY. FIRST AMPLIFLICATION AND NOW THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION HAS DISTORTED MOST PEOPLES CONCEPT OF SOUND. RIGHT NOW PEOPLE DON'T CARE ABOUT SOUND,BUT LONGITIVITY. THE QUALITY IN CD'S IS PRESENT ,BUT IT DOES NOT POSSESS THE SAME PLATFORM OF TRUE ANALOG, ALTHOUGH DIGITAL HAS TO BE CONVERTED TO ANALOG IN ORDER FOR YOU TO LISTEN TO IT. IF SOMEONE CAN MARKET A LASER TABLE FOR UNDER A THOUSAND DOLLARS, THEN VINYL MIGHT SUIT THE MASSES AND BEYOND. TECHNOLOGY IS FOR TIMES AND NOT THE PEOPLE.,ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE WHO THINK THEY KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON.
14. Sven - March 26, 2009 7:46 AM
Marketing forces have kept the laser turntable off the market. The money men wanted to sell CD's, the electronics companies followed suit. Robots can make cheap consumer electronics but record players have to be expensively hand-built. Guess which gives the highest profits? All it would take is one major name to market a laser turntable at a good price for the floodgates to open. Nobody's heard of ELP and they don't have the clout or money to market their product at a cost that will attract the mainsteam consumer. The old-fashioned yinyl record has a far wider dynamic range than a CD, that was pegged at 44MHz because that was all they could manage at the time with the technology they had and nobody's dared to change it since. We can do far better today. But even if they were to change the 44MHz format, CD is only up-and-down, vinyl is sideways as well, theoretically able to carry twice the frequency-range of CD. All we need to do is make vinyl and coat it with a film, just like a CD has, and no more dust problems! Vinyl is just a mechanically operated CD. I'm suprised nobody is making vinyl by laser-etching rather than pressing them in a mold, this might be the ultimate. I'd love to buy an ELP laser turntable but I'm a poor pensioner with a few thousand vinyl albums I wear out the old way. 15,000 dollars? No way. But I honestly see no reason why a quality laser turntable can't be marketed for a 1,000-1,500 bucks. Marantz, are you listening?