[kj] another Vote For HA! CD

[Jerry]

> My 10 inch Ha! vinyl does'nt play in my cd player,haha,Cheers,Cliff

Try shaving off the outer 5 inches with a knife, then it will fit in the
drawer. Don't know if it will play though. Perhaps our more technically
minded Gatherers can help on this one...

This reminds me of an email I had from another list:


In November 1981, a music critic from The New York Times traveled to
Philadelphia to test a local physician's amazing ability to recognize any
piece of classical music merely by looking at the pattern of grooves on a
vinyl LP.

The critic handed Dr. Arthur Lintgen several label-less LPs, and was
delighted to see him correctly identify the music within seconds merely by
looking at the records' surface.

"For his pièce de résistance, Dr. Lintgen spotted the Strauss Alpine
symphony, adding with pride -- and astonishing correctness -- that Strauss
was conducting," wrote the critic, Bernard Holland.

Now, a university student from Israel has written a piece of software that
goes a step further. Ofer Springer has created a "virtual gramophone" that
plays LPs using an ordinary flatbed scanner.

Springer's Digital Needle uses a high-resolution image of an LP captured by
a flatbed scanner. (Because 12-inch LPs are bigger than the image glass on
most scanners, Springer first takes four pictures and stitches them
together into a single image.)

Then, like a needle on a record player, his software follows the image of
the groove as it spirals around the record, generating sounds based on the
wavelike patterns of the groove.

The results are barely recognizable as the original music, but strangely
affecting. Springer has posted samples on the project's Web page.

Springer, a 22-year-old student studying physics and computer science at
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, readily admits the software is almost
completely useless. The results are too poor for ripping old LPs and
turning them into MP3s. But Springer said he was pleased with the work as a
technology demonstration.

"The main purpose was to show an audio signal could be visually recoverable
from a record," he said. "For most purposes, there is no point in applying
it. Simply using a mechanical player is more suitable."

Springer got the idea one evening after examining an old LP with a
magnifying glass. The wave forms created by the tightly spaced grooves led
him to believe there must be a way to extract sound from the visual
patterns.

Trouble is, only certain mono recordings encode music laterally, in the
left-to-right axis of the groove. Many encode sound vertically, in the
groove's hills and valleys.

Most modern stereo LPs encode sound in the walls of a V-shaped groove. Each
wall of the V is covered in tiny bumps and pits, which are translated into
the left and right stereo channels by the needle as it travels down the
groove.

Marshall Lisé, an audio engineer with analog chipmaker Xicor of Milpitas,
California, said although Springer's idea seems like a good one, it is
impractical because he isn't looking at the right part of the groove.

"It's a clever idea, but it'll never work" Lisé said. "If the scanner is
looking straight down into the groove, it's reading artifacts of the
recording process, not the recording itself."

To read the recording, Springer would have to figure out a way to examine
each wall of the V diagonally, Lisé said.

This, in fact, is what expensive laser turntables do. Made by ELP, a
Japanese manufacturer, the Laser Turntable uses five separate lasers to
read LPs optically. Two lasers guide the head down the groove, two more
examine each wall and a fifth maintains the right distance from the surface
of the record.

It's a lot more sophisticated than a flatbed scanner, and a lot more
expensive. The basic model costs $10,000.

And what was Dr. Lintgen's method? The good doctor didn't examine the
individual grooves of vinyl LPs like Springer's software does. Instead,
Lintgen studied the patterns of light and dark sections that are easily
discerned on most records.

The patterns of light and dark helped him estimate the volume and length of
different sections of the piece, which he compared to his deep knowledge of
the movements of classical music.

Springer's Digital Needle software can be downloaded from his site for free.

http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/


j

p.s. hello Aleph

p.p.s. r.i.p. Laura Sadler *sniff*


---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.491 / Virus Database: 290 - Release Date: 18/06/2003