It’s great technology for long-term archiving.
“Look ahead” to determine optimal groove spacing doesn’t have to be done digitally, even though digital makes this much simpler.
I’d guess that musicians and producers using an all-analogue recording / mixing / mastering process where they have zero digital stages to the master tape are very few and far between nowadays. Kevin Shields for one, but he likely has other options for his analogue master disk cutting, and only needs to attend disc cutting once or twice a decade/century.
A transparent digital stage for the master isn’t going to make a huge amount of difference really, and the limited bandwidth of vinyl compared to digital means that the vinyl master has to be squashed and limited regardless.
> I’s great technology for long-term archiving.
Dam right. It’s a medium that a reasonably intelligent individual from any time in future/past history could intuitively understand. Let’s not forget that NASA chose a record to store the digital images it sent with Voyager on precisely that assumption.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...
Also it can be "read" non intrusively with a laser-pickup, like a CD, without wearing the medium down.
It works and sounds like a good idea but boy do lasers see dust spots and things like that.
I believe they indeed do, but for digitizing rare records, they are much better than their physical counterparts. Considering that we can now remove these pops and clicks way better than we did before, it's a worthy thing to have for preservation purposes:
Laser Turntable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
Click and Pop Removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LvCRzWCpU
Archival optical media is likely much better than any kind of open groove technology.
I dunno if Blu-Ray players are going to exist 100 or 1000 years from now, but it could be very challenging to recreate them.
On the other hand you can play a phonograph record by sticking your fingernail into the groove!
The Church of Scientology has done a lot of work towards preservation of the (worthless!) works of L. Ron Hubbard
https://www.colinsjamjar.com/p/scientologists-jumpstarted-th...
focused around things like laser engraving and phonograph records made of durable materials such that people would be able to read them with whatever technology we have in the future.
Vinyl is not great for archiving. It degrades and is affected by dust.