CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[TGM]

If you had to choose between having new discs printed in 2024 with any title you want modern or old, or brand new readily available styli produced at reasonable prices, what would you choose and why?

[jjones7]

Dang, that's a tough choice. Since the existing CED catalog is pretty broad, and since most new movies are awful, I'm gonna go with styli.

Still, that's tough since there are many older films I'd love to see on CED - Hammer and Amicus films, later 80s and 90s films, etc.

Tough call.

[jsdspif]

I'd def. go with syli,because without new ones eventually no player will work.The only thing I see as difficult is the very tip of the stylus but it seems like if they were originally made 50 years ago or whatever that they could be created today. For the main portion of the cart i see no problem making a real injection mold to create that and I could do that,I've built injection molds for about 30 years and still do general machining. I think it would just be a matter of finding someone who could make the stylus and by now there may be other ways to create the stylus.

[ketonic_dude]

New Styli for sure. I've exhausted pretty much every resource regarding rebuilding or new manufacture of styli. Keep in mind RCA spent millions on R&D of styli and their manufacture. There was specialized equipment built, hundreds if not thousands of people employed and they made tens of thousands of styli on a massive industrial scale. They produced enough styli and of sound enough quality that they are still being used by us over 40 years later. Not many products can make that claim. With that said you would think a record stylus is essentially the same thing. But you would be very mistaken. A CED stylus is 40 times smaller than a record stylus. It has to be manufactured to tolerances so extreme that a record stylus manufacturer has told me that it's not even possible today, unless you plan to spend a considerable amount of money, like RCA did. John Stevens told me the company that RCA got their diamonds from is still around today, but a minimum purchase is $12,000. He didn't say how many diamonds that is, could be 100, or could be 1,000, not sure. Either way, I don't have 12k to drop on just the diamond portion of a stylus. After that you have to manufacture the titanium electrotrode that is r/f sputtered onto the diamond which actually reads the disc. While this technology does exist today and there are companies that can do it, the cost of setup and production is extremely high. The a/i tube, ribbon cable, and housing, are probably the cheapest parts and probably only be a couple hundred to manufacture and construct per stylus. When all is said and done, you could build new styli, but it would cost upwards of $1,000 plus per stylus, and that's on a bulk scale even. You would have to drop some serious cash, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to remanufacture styli. It's just not cost effective.

But there is an alternative that would be cheaper, but probably not work as well. With modern technology, it would be possible to build a laser that could read the disc and translate the information into the Mhz carrier information that the player can understand. It could be built small enough to fit into the stylus location and attach to the same connectors that the stylus uses. It would have to be battery powered or soldered to a random voltage location on the player for power. This would be a much cheaper and easier option. The only problem with this is discs that are dirty or would typically skip because of the silicone, they might not read very good. Some engineering would have to go into this to make it functional but it's something we could see in the future.

Believe it or not RCA did build optical CED players for the mastering department to verify disc copies. So a lot of the technical information is already out there. It's just a matter of finding a MIT grad in need of a pet project and some proper funding.