Mark's Notebook

High Tech Lets Old Recordings Speak Again

Discovery Channel

By Jennifer Viegas

July 23, 2004 — A high-tech system originally developed to track down elusive subatomic particles is now being used to digitize old records and cylinders previously thought to be unplayable, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The new system, created by Berkeley Lab scientists Vitaliy Fadeyev and Carl Haber, originally was used to determine particle path collisions in research on the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle believed to give objects mass. Now the technology plays and preserves records and tin and wax cylinders without even touching their grooves.

Fadeyev and Haber first tested it out on two LPs: "Goodnight Irene" by The Weavers and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" by Marian Anderson. The albums, full of pops, skips, and scratches, played like new.

A powerful microscope called a SmartScope with a digital camera collects images of the groove patterns on records or cylinders, which rest on a table moved with precision motors. A computer program allows the microscope/camera combo to travel forward along the grooves until it reaches the end of the recording.

The captured image pattern transfers to a computer that translates the tiny, millimeter-sized lines into sound.

"For discs, the sound is stored in the side-to-side movement of the groove and the SmartScope had a good ability to image in the two-dimensional plane," Fadeyev said. "For cylinders, the sound is stored in the up-and-down undulations of the surface. So once we saw that the SmartScope worked reasonably well on disc, we looked for another instrument, which could measure surface heights."

The instrument they chose was a scanning probe that allows for capture of the three-dimensional patterns found on cylinders.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040719/recording.html

Also:

http://www-cdf.lbl.gov/%7Eav/

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008