 thumb|elp laser turntable (lt-2xa) and rme fireface 800 a laser turntable (or optical turntable) is a phonograph that plays lps (and other gramophone records) using laser beams as the pickup â the way a compact disc player plays cds â instead of using a stylus as in conventional turntables. ==history== william k. heine presented a paper entitled a laser scanning phonograph record player to the 57th audio engineering society (aes) convention in may 1977. the paper details a method developed by heine that employs a single 2.2&nbsp;mw heliumâneon 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 u.s. patent 3,992,593 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 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 (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. the first working model, the finial lt-1 (laser turntable-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, rather than pushing them aside as a conventional stylus would. the non-contact laser pickup does have the advantages of el
1986_introductions American_inventions Audio_engineering Turntables