The excellent series on cutting lathes and analog tape in Copper magazine have me wondering if some inspired people have tried to solve the puzzle of better media for playback and storage of analog music.
Tech has changed so dramatically with optics, for instance, that perhaps burning and reading disks can be done in an analog manner, down to sub micron dimensions. Perhaps not disks at all, but a scanned surface (or hologram).
Tough industry to introduce a new format, especially with digital and streaming, but if something was an order of magnitude better…
120db dynamic range, no noise, no maintenance or setup…
The advantages of digital, in terms of accurate reproducibility. noise resistance and ease of manipulation, are so considerable that I doubt that there is any commercial incentive to introduce a new analogue medium. We have travelled a long way down the digital road.
1 Like
My thoughts too, but dreamers like Paul are always around to reject conventional wisdom. If it can be way better…
It would have to be easy to use and take up little space. I’d be skeptical of anything that required more room to store than tape or vinyl, or was more complicated to handle.
Independent of one’s opinion on the value or not of analog and digital, the interest of the industry is anyway different or at least much more multi layered than finding the best possible audio quality and sell it 
Especially if the customers are a niche group. And when it comes to format, big industry is needed.
1 Like