Virtual vinyl

[Bucky Ramone]

Berkeley Lab physicists develop way to digitally restore and preserve audio recordings

Quote:

Fadeyev and Haber turned to a precision optical metrology system used by Berkeley Lab physicists to inspect silicon detectors destined for the upcoming ATLAS experiment, which will search for a theorized but never observed particle called the Higgs Boson. Instead of measuring silicon detectors, however, they programmed the system to map the undulating grooves etched in shellac phonograph discs. The images were then processed to remove scratches and blemishes, and modeled to determine how a stylus courses through the undulations. Lastly, the stylus motion was converted to a digital sound format.

The result is a digital reproduction of a mechanical recording, with each wiggle, bump and ridge in the recording’s grooves faithfully captured, and each scratch ironed out.

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