ELP laser turntable - any comments?

About the ELP laser turntable: Stereophile "kinda" likes it;
but Absolute Sound's review is pretty much a "thumbs down." I
think it is probably something that all of us would like to
"play" with, if we could find a dealer who would let us to
that without exchanging big gobs of money. But, as for owning
one, only some time with the unit would tell. If you have a
lot of old vinyl, as I do, the clicks and pops might be too
much to bear. Just think of a CD in which you could hear all
the dust that has collected. CEM

The Loricraft record cleaner seems up to the task of cleaning even old dirty records for use with the ELP. At CES2004, SMART bought old records in Vegas. They were terrible initially, but after a cleaning they worked great, especially the Peggy Lee. The ability to raise or lower the lasar allowed getting to a clean portion of the track.

TAS reviews the ELP in the new issue. Valin finds all records sound the same on it and sound dull. This is totally at odds with what I heard at CES2004. I would characterize it as sounding quite different from other vinyl systems. I thought records sounded less romantic and more master tape like, but not digital like. Had it not been for the difficulties SMART had had, I might have bought one.

Valin compares the ELP with the Walker Prosideum which I once owned and which is excellent. I did not have this comparison at hand, of course.

It occurs to me that a conventional phono pickup is basically a cam follower...a mechanical device to trace the shape of a template (the recorded groove). We think of it as a very small mechanical device but it is actually very large in context of the technology of "nanomechanical" machines, a field that has seen amazing progress in recent years. If someone (with a lot of money) wanted to make a giant leap forward in vinyl playback I think that a nanomechanical phono pickup would make more sense than this optical approach.

Nanomechanical machines are fabricated like electronic integrated circuits, and usually include, on the same chip, the associated electronic circuits. Tracking force would be so low that you might need an optical servo arm to track the groove.

A project to develop such a pickup would be attractive only to a multimillionare audiophile with technical leanings and not enough to do. Anyone out there?

Since the ELP dates back probably 20 years, it is most dated technology.

Maybe on the profits from the Intelligent Chip, Golden Sound might be a prospect.