William K. Heine presented a paper "" to the 57th Audio Engineering Society 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 on 16 November 1976. Heine concluded in his paper that he hoped his work would increase interest in using lasers for phonographic playback.
Finial
Four years later in 1981 Robert S. Reis, a graduate student in engineering at Stanford University, wrote his master's thesis on "An Optical Turntable". 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. A non-functioning mock-up of the proposed Finial turntable was shown at the 1984 Consumer Electronics Show, 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, was completed in time for the 1986 CES. 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. The non-contact laser pickup does have the advantages of eliminating record wear, tracking noise, turntable rumble and feedback from the speakers, but the sound is still that of an LP turntable rather than a Compact Disc. The projected $2,500 street price limited the potential market to professionals and a few well-heeled audiophiles. The Finial turntable never went into production. The long development of the laser turntable exactly coincided with two major events,a major economic recession, and the introduction of the Digital Compact Disc, which soon began flooding the market at prices comparable to LPs. Vinyl record sales plummeted, and many established turntable manufacturers went out of business as a result. After Finial showed a few hand-built prototypes, tooling delays, component unavailability, marketing blunders, and high development costs kept pushing back the release date. With over US$20 million in venture capital invested, Finial faced a marketing dilemma: forge ahead with a selling price that would be too high for most consumers, or gamble on going into mass production at a much lower price and hope the market would lower costs. Neither seemed viable in a rapidly-shrinking market.
ELP
Finally, in late 1989 after almost seven years of research, Finial's investors 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 – twenty years after the initial proposal – as the ELP LT-1XA Laser Turntable, with a list price of US$20,500. The turntable, which uses two lasers to read the groove and three more to position the head, does allow one to vary the depth at which the groove is read, possibly bypassing existing record wear. It will not, however, read clear or colored vinyl records. ELP sells built-to-order laser turntables directly to consumers in two versions, at a reported cost of approximately $16,000 for the basic model.
Reception
In a 2008 review of the model ELP LT-1LRC, Jonathan Valin claimed “If I were to describe its presentation in a few words, they would be "pleasant but dull."” He commended the tonal accuracy of playback, but criticized the lack of dynamic range and bass response compared to Compact Discs. Records must be wet-cleaned immediately before playback or the lasers will pick up every speck of dust and dirt on the record, noise that a conventional magnetic cartridge would push aside. Valin describes the noise as "the sound of someone munching potato chips." Overall, this system is recommended only for library archivists who need to transfer damaged historic recordings.
IRENE system
A completely separate technology has been developed by physicists Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Installed in the Library of Congress late in 2006, the IRENE System uses a camera rotating around the record and taking detailed photographs of the grooves. Software then uses the digital images to reconstruct the sound. In 2018 the system was used to play, for the first time, the only known recording of Alexander Graham Bell's voice. IRENE often produces a large amount of hiss with the recording, but it is very capable of removing pops and clicks produced by imperfections on the record surface.
