Fun aside. Is this really gonna work (find it hard to imagine)? I have no experience with mag lev, but looking at Dave's video about the DeLorean :-/
Is it not nearly to impossible to get a steady rotation via maglev? And doesn't kick starter requires a working prototype / POC ?
Dave, any change you would like to elaborate on this (they do ask for some serious dough!) ? :-)
It's doomed to failure, I'm fairly sure.
To get the plate/record spinning at a fixed RPM is hard enough, but to do that without wobble (some induced by the arm obviously) has got to be trickiest more fragile system I can imagine. The wow and flutter is going to be horrendous. I can't imagine how audiophiles would not be aware of this. But of course they are blinded by the wow factor (no pun intended) of the levitation.
The best audiophool turntables have huge mass plates for this very reason.
Pfft, I can solve that problem! Get rid of the old fashioned moving coil magnetic pickup and diamond tipped needle altogether. Replace them with a tiny macro camera and white LED!
So, the platter levitates off the base and the tone arm hangs over the record as it rotates. Since it never makes physical contact, there would never be any damage to the disk!
As the record rotates, the camera takes successive images (not unlike a flatbread scanner) and software is used to extrapolate the audio data in real time! The software would play the audio at the correct speed.
Seems far fetched, but this method (scanning a record) has actually been used to digitize some *very* old records. If I recall it was the National Archives that did it. There's also a method of using a laser to play back records; the audio quality is supposedly *very* good.Edit: The 2D optical scanning system is called IRENE and has been used to digitize some of the very first records ever produced, which are over 120 years old! It's actually The Library of Congress that uses this system. There's also an IRENE/3D system for digitizing quadraphonic and hill-dale records.
The laser based playback approach was first proposed in 1972 with a working prototype (LASERPHONE) shown in 1976. By 1986 a commercial version (Finial) was *almost* ready, with a projected street price of $2,500. Unfortunately, that was when CDs were starting to become popular, which pretty much killed the market for a laser turn table. In 1989 the company was sold (and became ELP Japan) and the product went through another 8 years of design before *finally* being released in 1997 for $20,000; 20 years after the first prototype!