I saw a posting on the 'gon a couple of days ago for a record player that uses a laser instead of a needle. The benefit (so they said) was that no sensitive needles to be used, no tonearm setup and you could skip tracks just like on CD. So it looks like this has been done before.
The Audiogon one is a different animal. If this is the one made in Japan, the laser (2 actually) is used to read the groove just like a stylus, and the modulated beam intensity returned is converted to an electrical signal. There is no quantization or sampling involved, so it is pure analog.
In theory, this should be the perfect TT. The laser beam is massless and therefore has perfect frequency response and can track any record in almost any condition.
In application, the electrical circuit which does the optical to electrical conversion may not be perfect. Nonetheless, I would really like to hear one of these (at $10k - $12K) compared to the $20K and up TTs.
And as you mention, this has the added benefit of random access like a cd player (on one side at a time anyway) as it scans the record for track spacing prior to play. And since nothing touches the record, near zero wear and much longer life.
BB
