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Re: [ARSCLIST] back to the future, forward to the past
Thanks David. This is very handy reference (saved the message).
I had e-mail with Carl Haber and he said that nothing he's working with works with the resolution of
consumer flatbed scanners. His system's effective resolution is 35,000 dpi (!). You can hear on his
website that his system absolutely works.
There was a project called "Digital Needle" that some computer kids in Israel started and then some
kids in Sweden picked up the ball. You can hear their results and they're not good.
So, as of now, no one seems to have software that does what I was proposing. So save your needles.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Seubert" <seubert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 1:22 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] back to the future, forward to the past
There are several non-contact/optical research projects (not commercial products like the ELP)
that I know of for grooved media:
1) Carl Haber and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley Lab are using 2-D and 3-D imaging to digitally
capture groove modulation at high resolution and then extract the audio signal. This has been
discussed on this list before and details are available here: http://www-cdf.lbl.gov/~av/.
2) The Laboratory of Metrology at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) is
developing an optical turntable using fiber optics to play back discs:
http://metwww.epfl.ch/lecteur_disques/LectDiscE.htm.
3) Researchers at the Ecole d’Ingénieurs de Fribourg (Switzerland) have been creating analog
images of discs with high contrast film (like microfilm or photoduplication film) and then
digitizing the image and extracting the groove modulations from the image. They presented at JTS
2004 and have published in the IASA Journal. http://www.eif.ch/visualaudio/.
4) Syracuse University's Radius Project has been developing laser playback for cylinders. They
published a research report in First Monday a couple of years ago:
http://www.firstmonday.dk/Issues/issue8_5/penn/index.html.
5) There was a project in Ukraine for optical playback of cylinders in the mid-1990s that I read
about in some optics journal, but I don't think I could track down citation information without
quite a bit of effort. I think this is the same project:
http://members.chello.se/christer.hamp/phono/petrov.html.
My personal opinion is that there are two potential outcomes of this research. Projects such as
Haber's may be useful for extracting information from unique/fragile/damaged media that should not
be played by contact methods because conventional playback would be impossible or damage would be
permanent and catastrophic. The second possible use (perhaps for Haber's and the second Swiss
group's research), would be for mass digitization projects where images could be quickly captured
assembly-line style and then later processed to retrieve the audio signal, eliminating the need
for a technician sitting and watching the record spin round and round and round in real time.
David Seubert
UCSB
Tom Fine wrote:
Wasn't someone working on software that you would "play" a scan of a grooved disk? Seems like if
such a thing ever got perfected, any decent letter-sized scanner could do 78 disks.
I for one would volunteer to be part of a "process community," where someone like Steven would
e-mail high-rez scans around and thus spread the complex and time-consuming computer processing
around. Jazz 78's only, please. I see no need to do this with the large portion of 78's already
professionally reissued on CD's. But the obscure ones are a different story.
-- Tom Fine