Modern inkjet printers can produce at least 1000dpi, meaning that 21 square inches of paper can carry 21,000,000 dots. Let's say 10,000,000 to leave some spaces. That's on the order of a megabyte of data, ignoring colour information.

21 square inches is, roughly, the area of a vinyl single. It follows, therefore, that a record player equipped with an optical sensor (and some simple lenses) ought to be able to read a paper single printed with data in the conventional spiral track pattern, and reproduce the sound at reasonably high quality. The head would track the data much as it does on a CD. Equally, your very own desktop printer should be able to download and print a PDF file which, when cut out into a circle, can be played.

It's a shame to waste the colour information. Allowing for printer variations, it should still be possible to quadruple (at least) the storage density using colour. As a simple option, red and blue could be used to encode two channels of stereo.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 01 2019

Feaster https://griffonaged...re-of-a-sound-wave/
[pocmloc, Oct 01 2019]

//reasonably high quality// - 1MB for a single track implies some pretty heavy compression. This appears to be a clever and elaborate way to achieve poorer sound quality whilst simultaneously increasing cost, complexity and the chance of something going wrong.
-- hippo, Oct 01 2019


There's a late Victorian German printed gramophone record that was scanned and realised by an American researcher a few years ago.
-- pocmloc, Oct 01 2019


//pretty heavy compression// An MP3 is only about 3-4Mb, so we're not far off, and the sound quality will be reasonable.

//a clever and elaborate way to achieve poorer sound quality whilst simultaneously increasing cost, complexity and the chance of something going wrong// Thank you. I gave it my best shot.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 01 2019



random, halfbakery