ELP laser turntable - any comments?

The new importer can be found at www.audioturntable.com

the importer claims that keith jarrett recommends this player. i love keith jarrett and, interestingly, his stuff sounds AMAZING on vinyl. who knows?

from reading between the lines on the website it seems you guys might be right about the dust issue. i hope they fix that soon because it's a great idea.

still, though, anybody out there who's actually heard one? anybody going to the show in nyc at the end of this month? i think they're going to have a set up there.

I heard one at the CES [2002 or 2003]. It was difficult to tell the sonic qualities, due to the other equipment in the chain. It is rather pricey, and has been carried and dropped by several distributors over the years. I would be concerned about future service. The old distributor, SMART Devices, had some pretty nasty things to say about the manufacturer when they dissolved their relationship with the manufacturer on July 16th, 2004 See the full story at this link:
SMART Devices

I sort of heard the table at the 2004 CES (didn't see it at 2005). Unfortunately, the demo equipment was so bad that it is impossible to determine the sound quality of the player. Either the distributor or manufacturers are complete idiots for assembling such an aweful, cheap, system, or they were trying to hide something.

One demonstration did show how the player was effective at handling damaged grooves from prior play under less than ideal conditions. The player can be adjusted to read the groove at different depths so that one can find a part of the groove that a bad stylus did not chew up. This part of the demonstration was effective.

I presume that the laser circuitry derives a digital signal from its optical inspection of the groove, which makes for the oportunity to do RIAA equalization and some pop and click elimination in the digital domain. But if the signal is digital, why bother with a mechanical recording media (vinyl) in the first place?

By the way, digital data can be recorded on vinyl, and played back with a normal phono pickup. At one time, on an experimental basis, stock market information was distributed this way, because a LP, once cut, can be rapidly reproduced by stamping out copies. At the time mag tape was the only other alternative, and mag tape takes time to copy because the tape must be drawn by the head. Digital data could use error correction encoding so that surface noise would not be a problem, but this digital approach would not work for music because the sample rate would be much too low.