Vinyl record sales plummeted, and many established turntable manufacturers went out of business as a result. The long development of the laser turntable exactly coincided with two major events, the early 1980s recession, and the introduction of the Digital Compact Disc, which soon began flooding the market at prices comparable to LPs (with CD players in the $300 range). After Finial showed a few hand-built (and finicky) prototypes, tooling delays, component unavailability (in the days before cheap lasers), marketing blunders, and high development costs kept pushing back the release date. The Finial turntable never went into production. The projected $2,500 street price (later raised to $3,786 in 1988) limited the potential market to professionals (libraries, radio stations and archivists) and a few well-heeled audiophiles. 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 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 first working model, the Finial LT-1 (Laser Turntable-1), was completed in time for the 1986 CES. Ī non-functioning mock-up of the proposed Finial turntable was shown at the 1984 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), 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. Stoddard founded Finial Technology to develop and market a laser turntable, raising $7 million in venture capital. In 1983 he and fellow Stanford electrical engineer Robert E. Reis, a graduate student in engineering at Stanford University, wrote his master's thesis on "An Optical Turntable". Heine concluded in his paper that he hoped his work would increase interest in using lasers for phonographic playback.įour years later in 1981 Robert S. In development since 1972, the working prototype was named the "LASERPHONE", and the methods it used for playback was awarded U.S. 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.
Heine presented a paper " A Laser Scanning Phonograph Record Player" to the 57th Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention in May 1977.
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