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ELPJ Laser Turntable - here's the guts of it! (really long)

64.193.131.21

Posted by csown on June 13, 2001 at 02:00:49

Hi All,

I just got back from the ELPJ laser turntable demonstration in Chicago. Mr. Sanju Chiba, the president of ELPJ was personally conducting the presentation. It occurred in a little conference room in the Chicago O'Hare Marriot. Quite a few people showed up... mostly middle-age to older men, me (a 21-year old), and Mr. Chiba of course.

The system was not anything that I would use... a lot of pretty expensive stuff and a pair of big Avalon floorstanders driven by big Bel monoblocks. The setup was not ideal - the room had a terrible cieling, was carpeted, there were tables in front of the speakers, etc... but one could get the big picture I guess. Also keep in mind that I like a small, homey, smooth-but-lush system, so my tastes are a little different from what I heard.

The presentation was quite nice and Mr. Chiba outlined the niceties of this table, saying that the 2um laser can resolve 20KHz modulations quite easily, better than a 4um shibatta, and that it can track warped records without distortions (though it can't track mis-centered discs without pitch modulation).

Interesting points:

• It tracks with 5 lasers - one for disc height, two for reference (groove position), and 2 for reading the modulations. There is a very nice video on the ELPJ website that shows the 5 beams in a humid environment (so that you can see the beams) tracking a really warped disc. It's really neat.
  
• The reference beams track the average position of where the groove walls meet the lands. The circuitry averages the position of the modulations such that 50% reflectance of the intial beam is achieved. This is how it reads fizzucked discs. It can even read a broken disc taped together! (and rarely skipped on anything, even totally screwed discs)
  
• It cannot track colored discs (it's tuned to the absorption of black vinyl - you don't get the proper 50% then). I presume if you gold- or nickel-plate your colored discs, you can play them :). The rationale is that there are far more discs in one's collection that has distortion/mis-tracking than one has colored discs.
  
• Unlike a shibatta, it reads the farther OUT of the groove rather than farther in. It uses the reference lasers to find the groove, then you can tune the read lasers to read various parts of the groove +/- 2um or so. This is very interesting!
  
• You must run a calibration disc for the lasers to properly calibrate every so often. I don't doubt that it works extremely well. It takes into account humidity and temperature changes due to the seasons (the optics in the read system will change with these variables).
  
• Contrary to common assertions that it can eliminate clicks and pops, is does not, especially on bad discs. It does however smooth over them. The sound is very weird because it's unlike any click or pop you hear on a normal turntable. Remember that the system is completely analog - any processing other than analog filters is off-limits. I guess it was an interesting trade-off between too much filtering and staying true to the original signal. I bet that if they redesigned it so that it read deeper into the groove (very difficult technical challenge, as the laser must EXIT the groove in order to be read), it would not click or pop. The flipside of this is that a record cleaning machine is better at getting grooves out of the shallower parts of the groove but not the deeper parts.
  
• I think it's pretty ugly and looks like any old box-o'-electronics... they would certainly sell a lot more units if they made chrome accents, made the chips accessible on the outside, gave it a bizarre shape (like EAR-Yoshino products), or other gimmicks hi-fi people use to increase 'value'. However, this also shows that the company is honest and is truly trying to make a real, and very difficult-to-implement, product.
  
• The ridiculously hard-to-track TelArc 1812 disc tracked perfectly on the ELPJ, and those tympani cannons were all there in full glory.
  
• The claim is that it is true to the original sound. No colorations, no cartridge/tonearm signatures, just the table as one unit. Mr. Chiba's statement is "It plays the music document, 100 percent!".
  
• It plays 33's, 45's, 78's, up to 90rpm's!
  
• They give you a free top-of-the-line VPI cleaner.
  
• Warranty service requires you to send it back to Japan. This is ~$300, they send it back to you. For a 15K-25K product, that's not too bad.
  

Sadly, there is nothing to go on when it comes to sound quality, since not a lot of people will have that kind of system, and too many variables were at play. The room was not ideal, there were too many factors involved (things like EXCELLENT RCA cabling throughout, but the ELPJ-to-phonopre was a junk Radio Shack variety), and my friend and I were way in the back fo the room. Here is what I can confidently say about the sound:

• It is extremely clean-sounding.
  
• It may be a little lean, but...
  
• It sounds analog - I'm glad it maintains that 'soul' in the medium we love.
  
• It doesn't skip, but you can still hear clicks and pops.
  
• No rumble, inexistant groove noise.
  
• ¡It does not destroy your records!
  
• These guys tried hard, and it works! The technology has been in-the-making for a long time. Only the Japanese could have pulled it off, and it sounds damn good for being something so ridiculously different, the first of its kind. This is a true marvel of engineering, folks.
  
• I'm sure the analog could use some tweaking for personal tastes. It might be interesting if they would provide the perfect analog stream and you could mix-and-match your downstream components (including filtering devices) much like you would a DAC or phonostage. In any case, one can choose a warmer (pre)amp downstream, and mix-and-match. This device would require synergy considerations as does any component.
  

One problem we had during the presentation was that at one point, both units he had weren't working. These units both came from Japan with him, had two shows in NY, so I wouldn't doubt it was something that happened during shipping. We had to open up one of the units and shake loose a ball-bearing that had dropped out of the tray mechanism...that was an adventure, and I really got to get up close and see what the innards looked like while running. While this may have 'looked' bad, it is something standard.... tons of folks w/ CD players have this happen to them. At this scale of 12" discs, shipping is especially hard on hardware like this, and the laser assembly is much more fragile than that of CD. I'm surprised it was the transport mechanism and not the lasers that farted out. Finally got it to work though.

Regarding the hardware, it is a simple tray mechanism with a free-floating felt-on-mdf (I think) platter that is picked up by the motor system inside, so it's like a CD being clamped by a transport. The laser array is a single unit of biprisms and mirrors that is computer-controlled; slides around like a CD player laser. There are 3 boards as far as I could tell. One analog processing board (including laser control, one laser power board, and perhaps the main power supply board. There is a large motor driving the platter, and a stepper motor for moving the laser array. Exactly analagous to what's found in a floppy drive or CD-ROM.

My biggest complaint is that it's somewhat slow to insert and cue up a disc. If they set it up such that you stuck your disc on a platter like normal and brought down the lasers like on a linear tracking arm, it would seem less foreign and probably more acceptable to hard-core vinylphiles. I think it would be really neat to make a unit that had a glass platter that would allow reading from below. If they did this, they could also use two laser arrays and you wouldn't have to flip the disc!

My final verdict - I would buy one to play with if I could afford it. The idea of not destroying records is very appealing - one can play records for people who don't appreciate them so much (i.e., at parties, etc) - for example, you could finally play records for background music! - and you don't have to worry about discs that skip. All your records are pristine, one can lose the time-consuming routines we're used to, except for vacuuming discs. I'm actually quite excited that they've actually pulled it off. It is the ultimate turntable for archival purposes. Every well-endowed music library worth its salt should have one.

If you've got any questions about it, lemme know. I'm sure I missed something. It was a very interesting presentation, and Mr. Chiba is a very friendly fellow and seems to be genuine in his efforts.

Best,

Chris

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