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Does it fix all the scratches on the vinyl media?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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When I was a boy (read: long, long ago), our neighbor shipped a small pile of old records to a US company who read the tracks photographically, in stray light, so the groove was in deep shadow, with the groove top making a sharp edge with the illuminated top surface. The pickup rests somewhat down in the groove, wearing the sides, but doesn't touch that sharp edge.
Reading the sharp, unworn edge, and transferring its waves to a magnetic tape was close to directly reading the master tape. Our neighbor told that the tape he received made him aware of instruments he never knew was in the orchestra when listening to the record ...
This was in the 1970s, so it must have been done with analog technology. I recently made some back-of-envelope estimates of what it would take to do this with a digital camera and digital logic. I was shocked by the technical requirements. It certainly can be done, but probably not in your hobby workshop in your basement, if you get my drift ...
If you make such a setup, handling scratches and dust is a trivial matter. Wear doesn't matter at all. Frequency is no problem - waves are really flat. The big issue is to read the amplitude with high precision, for obtaining a good S/N ratio. I really wish that I had the resources to set up a system that could do this with, say, an 8k pixel image sensor across the track width, 13 bits of resolution, or 12 bits for each edge in a stereo track. (HiFi freaks frown at 12 bits resolution, but anything beyond that requires very expensive sensors.)
I suspect that my neighbor's records may have been 78s, i.e. widely spaced mono tracks of below-HiFi frequency range. But then: This was fifty years ago. Today we should be able to handle both 'microgroove' records and stereo sound.
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HiFi fans are crazy. Vinyl/analog fans are the loonies among the crazy.
I'll give those analog guys one digit (i.e. thumb), though: High quality digital sound requires that there is no clipping! Digital clipping is terrible. Clipping does occur in analog circuits as well, but in a much more gradual way - especially with tubes, as opposed to transistors. The audible effect is not quite as bad as in the digital world. Maybe it is, if you drive a tube amp into the same amount of clipping, percentage wise, but with a given sharp peak in the input signal, the measured clipping will be lower - the amp will be able to partially follow the signal, rather than cut it off abruptly.
An old story:
When I was a high school exchange student in the US in the 1970s, I lived with a family where the father had been a soldier in the Korean war, as a radio man. His patrol was locked in by an enclave of enemy troops, in a location where their radio was not able to make contact with the headquarter to request support. But they managed to modify the voltage regulator to provide twice the rated anode voltage to the final transmitter stages, raising the output signal so much that they managed to get through to the headquarter, and enforcements were sent to rescue them.
My host family father was a radio engineer for the rest of his life, but he never really became friends with transistors. His life was saved by tubes, because they can (for a short time) be run far beyond their ratings. He always maintained that if their equipment back then had been transistorized, any similar attempt to push the transmitter beyond limits would have burnt the power transistors off immediately, and they wound not have survived.
There are close parallels between tube/transistor and analog/digital. My idea is that if you really want the benefit of analog 'soft clipping', doing analog on transistors is a hybrid, a bastard. Proper analog sound requires the 'soft' headroom provided by tubes.
I do not own any tube amp. I will never get myself one. But I feel sort of regard for those analog fans who insist on tube technology throughout. It makes me think than maybe they listen with their ears, not by the specs.
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I agree with you on clipping. I've experienced that in relation to musical instruments & I believe in another place...
We have a maytag clothes washer & it has this belt problem that makes it scream! From the first time we used it it would SCREAM!!!
I decided (ignorantly) to attempt to record it using an Android phone an iPhone anything like that.
Well, the built-in microphones definitely clip the sound so that hit only sounds like a slight sound but in real life it is EAR-SHATTERING!! Seriously.
Also, I think sound is often suited better to analog world too actually. I get it.
It's just that this stylus/needle being $999 seems a bit out there.
I also really like the warm sound of tube amps (as a electric guitarist).
Great story by the way. Thanks for sharing.
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This is the first time that someone has clearly explained to me why vinyl/analog can sound better than CD/digital.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Just getting back into vinyl, its just a better experience. Also got an Akai reel to reel and the sound quality is awesome.
When I was in Nam I
Had an airforce guy going on r&r bring me back an akai m8. One day I was recording and we got a rocket attack and I dove for the bunker. When it was over I came back up and noticed it had been recording so I refund and played it back.
Well it was a recording of the attack and it sounded so real everyone dove back into bunkers. Ehen they heard me laughing they all came back up and proceeded to cuss me. From then on I when we got attacked they we old ask me if I left the fsmnrd machine running
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - A updated version available!
JaxCoder.com
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I bet you have alot of stories. Sounds rough, glad you made it out of all that.
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LMFTFY
You love the sound of vinyl? Pay $1k to make it sound like a cd instead!
The "lower quality" sound is the point of vinyl.
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"Paste as plain text"
How have I been a Windows (and probably works in other OS's as well?) for years and years and not know that keyboard shortcut?
So useful, as I copy and paste stuff all the time. Not code! Things like a Teams message into an email, or vice versa, or quote that I'm citing in an essay, or something in Excel to an email, ... the list goes on.
Well, I guess you can teach an old dog a new trick. 
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Here's another old dog who just learned a new trick that would occasionally be useful.
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ditto
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Me too. I bet my dog is older than your dog 
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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Ditto. And I pride myself on using shortcuts!
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I remember when it was Shift-Insert to paste. Which still works.
Jack of all trades, master of none, though often times better than master of one.
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Hmm, just tried that in Outlook and it preserves the formatting.
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Outlook is an Office product, so it is - of course - totally compatible with all other Office products.
Except Excel. Oh, and PowerPoint. And Word, and probably OneNote.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I remember when CTRL-G made the PC beep, a relic from the days when teletypes ruled the world. I guess nobody told the designers of sound cards about backward compatibility.
Will Rogers never met me.
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The "Bell" character. Back in my days of setting up DOS based POS machines, we used that code to pop the cash drawer.
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Yep. When I last worked in Retail, we were still using it to trip the drawer latch. Computers don't beep like they used to, but most drawers have a little bell that sounds when they open. I believe the original use was to alert a teletype operator of a new incoming message. I just enjoyed using it to send to the boss' terminal to annoy him.
Will Rogers never met me.
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You have to send it to the stdout for the beep.
I used to add that to long batch files to alert me at certain steps like:
“Insert next floppy”
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Old dogs Unite! Me too. I'll have to try this later on this morning.
I wonder can you teach puppies too?
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Judging by QA, "No."
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I doubt it. From my experience, 'puppies' would say "what is keyboard shortcut? I just right-click...." 
But Marc, thanks for that reminder of a shortcut I always forget about. I LOVE keyboard shortcuts - I had to especially learn them when first using Excel 2.1 on a runtime version of Windows with no mouse. 
-Wayne
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Another old dog gets a new trick ... thanks!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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