Sorry watching a Columbo episode ('The Bye-Bye Sky-High IQ Murder Case') and they just mentioned having a record turntable that you could program to play a particular track, or even repeat a selection of tracks, and wait, how could *that* be a thing? They said it had a computer but even so?
@Austin_Dern Those exist! I have no idea how well they work but there have been record players that can identify where tracks start and end
i think they use optical methods but i'm not sure of the details
-F
@Felthry So I'm discovering! The particular model from this episode used some sort of optical system, apparently an infrared sensor, which is amazing.
@Austin_Dern you can actually get record players that *play* the record optically these days
they work... abysmally. they can't play picture discs or weird-colored discs at all, and even on plain black discs they react really badly to any amount of dust on the record at all
-F
@Felthry I am aware of those! But have only heard of them really being used for archivists trying to record truly fragile albums, with the idea being you go from a high-quality picture of the grooves to a reconstruction of the sound.
@Austin_Dern I believe they're marketed at audiophiles too
-F
@Austin_Dern i'm not sure how much of it is rule-of-cool because-lasers and how much of it is people wanting to preserve their discs by not touching them (not that a properly weighted stylus really does much to the disc unless you play it tens of thousands of times)
-F