I was looking at some old vinyl records and though it would be neat to examine one under a microscope. Below are a few micro-photgraphs of the grooves in a vinyl record at 90X magnification. It is amazing how much dust can build up in the grooves!

Vinyl Record

Out of interest I played around with edge detection filters in various image processing applications. Based upon my preliminary results, I'm sure if someone had an automated way to capture a high resolution image of the whole record surface you could process the groove variations into a audio waveform without using a needle to create the sound.

You would need to perform a thorough cleaning of the record before hand to minimize dust which would drastically improve the recognition accuracy. Then you would image the vinyl record at 90X magnification using a motorized X / Y table. You would then stitch together a large digital microphotograph mosaic. The software would then have combine a polar to rectangular conversion to unspiral the tracks into a long linear waveform sequence. Then it would perform a vector tracing process and convert the data into a integer / floating point sound file based upon waveform amplitude.

Vinyl Record Grooves @ 90 X Magnification

Vinyl Record Grooves

Digitally Traced Contour of Record Grooves

Autotrace

Vectorized Autotraced image. The SVG can be downloaded here.