A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English, or record) is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts near the periphery and ends near the center of the disc. At first, the discs were commonly made from shellac; starting in the 1950s polyvinyl chloride became common. In recent decades, records have sometimes been called vinyl records, or simply vinyl, although this would exclude most records made until after World War II.
ELPJ, a Japanese-based company, sells a laser turntable that uses a laser to read vinyl discs optically, without physical contact. The laser turntable eliminates record wear and the possibility of accidental scratches, which degrade the sound, but its expense limits use primarily to digital archiving of analog records, and the laser does not play back colored vinyl or picture discs. Various other laser-based turntables were tried during the 1990s, but while a laser reads the groove very accurately, since it does not touch the record, the dust that vinyl attracts due to static electric charge is not mechanically pushed out of the groove, worsening sound quality in casual use compared to conventional stylus playback. In some ways similar to the laser turntable is the IRENE scanning machine for disc records, which images with microphotography in two dimensions, invented by a team of physicists at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories. IRENE will retrieve the information from a laterally modulated monaural grooved sound source without touching the medium itself, but cannot read vertically modulated information. This excludes grooved recordings such as cylinders and some radio transcriptions that feature a hill-and-dale format of recording, and stereophonic or quadraphonic grooved recordings, which utilize a combination of the two as well as supersonic encoding for quadraphonic. An offshoot of IRENE, the Confocal Microscope Cylinder Project, can capture a high-resolution three-dimensional image of the surface, down to 200 um. In order to convert to a digital sound file, this is then played by a version of the same 'virtual stylus' program developed by the research team in real-time, converted to digital and, if desired, processed through sound-restoration programs.

Q: What is a laser turntable?
A: uses a laser to read vinyl discs optically, without physical contact.

Q: When was this created?
A: 1990s,

Q: Did this become popular?
A: unknown

Q: What did you find interesting in this section?
A: the laser does not play back colored vinyl or picture discs.
Was that used a lot?
unknown unknown unknown unknown unknown
unknown