Floating Record Vertical Turntable

[rthorntn]

$1.5M already:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gramovox/floating-recordtm-vertical-turntable

Vertical record player, the claims seem a bit BS, it's been done before, it surely must decrease the SQ?

[helius]

I would guess that the 1.5" speakers in a shitty laminate box do more to harm the sound quality 
Seriously, all of the vertical plane record players use linear tracking, not a tonearm. I think the inventors were asleep when "center of gravity" was discussed in class. 

[rthorntn]

It's very clearly "form over function", and the people born in the noughties love form

[edpalmer42]

How do they isolate the tonearm from the vibrations caused by the speakers?  I'd like to see a frequency response run.

And why are they talking about a conical stylus tip?  I realize they've got an elliptical tip but so does every other decent turntable made in the last 50 years!  It makes no sense to talk about how superior it is.  It's like saying that rubber tires give a smoother ride than wooden wheels!

[rthorntn]

Simply because they started with an idea to make a cool turntable (because of all the "rebirth of vinyl" press) and have no idea about the specifics of it, hence the copy/paste of turntable/tonearm/cartridge marketing BS...

$1.5M says nobody cares about the specifics

[ElektroQuark]

Years agos there was a vertical record player from AIWA that was AUTOREVERSE!!

(Or was it from AKAI?)

[bktemp]

Years ago there was a system that replaced the stylus with a laser, meaning that there was no wear on the record. Not sure what ever happened to that, patented to death maybe?

Seems to be still available:
http://elpj.com/

[mikerj]

Polished acrylic platter

That should encourage a pretty decent amount of static build up.

[edpalmer42]

Years ago there was a system that replaced the stylus with a laser, meaning that there was no wear on the record. Not sure what ever happened to that, patented to death maybe?

Seems to be still available:
http://elpj.com/

Don't look at the prices if you have a heart condition.   

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

It does look nice though. Gimmicky but fun.
People who like vinyl don't really care what it sounds like anyway. Just and a bit of white noise and occasional scratch noises to an mp3 file and you're set.

[McBryce]

Aaaarrrrggghhh!!!  The Audiophiles would have you up against the wall and shot (twice) for that statement! I assume you're just trying to get them annoyed.

I'm no Audio buff, but a big fan of Vinyl because I DO care about what the music sounds like. "Dumbed down", muffled MP3 is nowhere near the clarity of Vinyl and never will be. If your vinyl is scratched, you haven't been looking after them well enough.

That said, I can't imagine any real Vinyl fan going for this vertical device. The whole "ritual" of easing the needle down to the surface is gone, not to mention the fact that you need to pin the LP down in the middle and I can't imagine any vinyl fan being happy with those tiny speakers either.

McBryce.

[Mechanical Menace]

I'm no Audio buff, but a big fan of Vinyl because I DO care about what the music sounds like. "Dumbed down", muffled MP3 is nowhere near the clarity of Vinyl and never will be.

Except even MP3 can and does. If your digitised music sounds worse than vinyl you either like the lack of fine definition from vinyl* or are using codec settings from the way back times lost to most of our memories that were the late 90s.

They seem to have a shop where you can make appointments to listen... I'm kinda tempted, out of curiosity. I'm guessing that it will be a fairly unique sound since others have not bothered to copy the technology. Like STAX headphones, a bit niche.

It's not that no one else bothered, it's that the £4k (in 80s £s) machines came out just as CDs came to age with cheaper CD players and prices starting to compare with LP. At that point those who did cut there losses in the 89 and sold it to CTI who took 8 years to wait for people to forget the failed fad and reintroduce them for about £20k.

You could do a better job with a decent camera now anyhows for much cheaper. Archivists started making that move about 10 years ago.




*which is fair enough, I prefer the softer timber it gives to some music, especially orchestral recordings myself. Even if digital does sound more like you're there, warts and all.

[BradC]

Except even MP3 can and does. If your digitised music sounds worse than vinyl you either like the lack of fine definition from vinyl* or are using codec settings from the way back times lost to most of our memories that were the late 90s.

I'm not going to argue this because it's pointless and you'll just tell me I'm wrong, so this'll be a hit and run comment. I *will* say that I've never had any difficulty picking out the way lossy encoding smears cymbals and snare drums and I pick noisy vinyl any day of the week in preference to even the highest bitrate mp3.

Personally I prefer a well mastered CD to Vinyl, but generally vinyl was/is just mastered better because the engineer *had* to take care in working around the limitations of the media and it wasn't all about loud. CD's are just "slap it down and make it loud" and that is then exacerbated by lossy encoding when compressing.

[Tac Eht Xilef]

Years agos there was a vertical record player from AIWA that was AUTOREVERSE!!

(Or was it from AKAI?)

AKAI rings a bell, but I can't picture it. I remember Optonica (aka Sharp) had one in the early 80s, and there were also a few horizontal tray-load & slot-load dual-sided players.

[edy]

Am I wrong to say today's music is all mastered digitally anyways? What is the point of recording it on an analog medium then? Using proper audio codecs you buy great sounding music. The music industry has wholeheartedly embraced it... at various bitrate levels. Pretty soon on a subscription model people will not even own music, the quality will depend on their bandwidth.

I think there was a backlash to CD and digital and early MP3 due to badly mastered classics and over-compression which "over-sharpened" the music and made it sound too clean and unnatural. But this is an audio engineer issue, not the capabilities of the digital media.

This turntable is not linear tracking. It has a long arm with a pivot but probably balanced or controlled with a heavy amount of lateral dampening so it only moves very slowly. Otherwise the minute it gets knocked out of a groove the arm would just fall over. It looks cool but let's all agree this product is all about a nice looking center-piece to talk about at parties. Nothing wrong with that. It is a work of art.

[Mechanical Menace]

I *will* say that I've never had any difficulty picking out the way lossy encoding smears cymbals and snare drums and I pick noisy vinyl any day of the week in preference to even the highest bitrate mp3.

I was using mp3 in the generic "any compressed digital audio" sense. I personally use FLAC for my own rips and recordings. Some of the newer lossy codecs, mainly AAC 256kb/s, look like a promising compromise for throwing on the phone or whatever I should call those tiny little solid state Walkman thingies though.

[BradC]

I *will* say that I've never had any difficulty picking out the way lossy encoding smears cymbals and snare drums and I pick noisy vinyl any day of the week in preference to even the highest bitrate mp3.

I was using mp3 in the generic "any compressed digital audio" sense. I personally use FLAC for my own rips and recordings. Some of the newer lossy codecs, mainly AAC 256kb/s, look like a promising compromise for throwing on the phone or whatever I should call those tiny little solid state Walkman thingies though.

Right. mp3 != flac. My listening music on the iPod in my car is alac because I just can't tolerate compression artifacts on music I love and listen to by choice. If you'd specified a lossless format like flac rather than mp3 then I would not have even argued with you. Chalk and cheese.

[grumpydoc]

Am I wrong to say today's music is all mastered digitally anyways?

Yes, but 24-bit and 192kHz sampling.

In similar vein what does and always did puzzle me, though, is people waxing lyrical about "stereo imaging" in recorded music when the relative perception of where an instrument is on the sound stage relates purely to where the L-R pan pot was set on the mixing desk.

[amyk]

Seems to be still available:
http://elpj.com/

Thanks, that's interesting. Their Japanese site seems to have much, much better prices though: http://www.laserturntable.co.jp/

They seem to have a shop where you can make appointments to listen... I'm kinda tempted, out of curiosity. I'm guessing that it will be a fairly unique sound since others have not bothered to copy the technology. Like STAX headphones, a bit niche.

From the links I've found it is said to be very sensitive to dirt in the tracks, so I guess it would sound a bit noisier than a regular turntable. However, I'm more interested in what's inside... although it'd probably be very similar to a regular CD/DVD player. Anyone want to crowdfund a teardown?

[PA0PBZ]

However, I'm more interested in what's inside... although it'd probably be very similar to a regular CD/DVD player. Anyone want to crowdfund a teardown?

[janekm]

How do they isolate the tonearm from the vibrations caused by the speakers?  I'd like to see a frequency response run.

And why are they talking about a conical stylus tip?  I realize they've got an elliptical tip but so does every other decent turntable made in the last 50 years!  It makes no sense to talk about how superior it is.  It's like saying that rubber tires give a smoother ride than wooden wheels!

I take it you've not seen Duracell mentioning how superior their batteries are to zinc-carbon ones

[edy]

There could be a little fan or brush ahead of the laser just to clean it. As far as reading the grooves, it could work like an optical mouse scanner. There is a certain geometry in the groove if you look at a micro graph of a vinyl record. Using optical scan and some play with contrast of the image you would get an outline of the groove edge which encodes the waveform. Processors would then reconstruct the audio from the image. I thought I saw software once that did that.

[NoItAint]

"Gettin' Jiggy wit It"
 

[vk6zgo]

Some Jukeboxes used vertical turntables to play 45s--big discs are a bit unwieldy.

Others,seemingly contemporary with these,stacked the discs vertically & had a mechanism which pulled them out,put them on the turntable,played them,then reversed the process.
The vertical play setup would have to be easier than that!