henry@ginger.sri.com (Henry Pasternack) (01/16/91)
When I was at Stanford (80-85), my roommate was a mechanical engineer. Somehow or another he had some exposure to Finial; perhaps he worked there for a summer job. The turntable was very sophisticated, using a small laser to image the groove rather than a stylus (as was correctly reported on the newsgroup). It was absolutely necessary for the record to be centered on the platter, and quite precisely so. The center hole of the LP is not molded accurately enough for the laser turntable, so the Finial unit had no spindle. Rather, the disk was placed on the platter and a "tapper" would gently align it under laser control until the outer groove was perfectly centered. I believe that the performance of the turntable was outstanding. I think that if the product had been successful that it would have revolutionized the playing of LP's. Imagine virtually perfect playback performance with high noise immunity and no record wear. I think Finial intended to market the turntable for commercial applications (such as radio stations) where the lack of groove damage would be a major selling point, and the price wouldn't be as much of a problem. It is true that there were serious problems with development, and mass production in the commercial sense was never achieved. I don't think the price was $40,000, though. More like $10,000. The company eventually folded. I read in a magazine, perhaps a high-end journal, that there are maybe a dozen Finial turntables sitting on a shelf somewhere in the Silicon Valley, and they are *not* for sale. I would suppose the inventors don't want the fruit of their hard labor floating about so that it can be copied. A neat idea, conceived at the wrong time. It was inevitable, I suppose, that when laser and servo technology had developed to the point that the Finial turntable was realizable, that the compact disk would also come into being and take away the market for the analog laser system. -Henry