The Digital Gramophone
December 24th, 2007 Posted in classical music
This is old but interesting. Some guy noticed that if you look at the grooves of a record with a magnifying glass you can actually see the encoded soundwaves. Naturally, he decided to stick them in a scanner and attempt to extract the sound by analyzing the scanned images, with limited success as you can hear by means of the file on his website.
This reminds me of those laser based record players. Except, you know, way slower and about fifty thousand times worse quality.
December 25th, 2007 at 9:45 am
I wouldn’t be surprised that the result was unsatisfactory, if the records were stereo, since the two channels were recorded in one groove by cutting them at 45-degree angles to the vertical, or something like that (can’t remember the details). So a simple scan from above the record would not necessarily come up with anything useful.