COMPANY REINVENTS THE PHONOGRAPH RECORD

The claim sounded too fantastic to be real: a record album with a playing time measured not in minutes, but in hundreds of hours? And one that can be played on all conventional record players with no additional special equipment?

That phenomenal assertion for the new “Interactor” phonograph record developed by Harvest Time Inc. of San Clemente both is and isn’t true.

What you can’t do with Harvest Time’s invention is place the needle at the beginning of the record and have days of uninterrupted listening. The real-time (the total number of minutes of recorded material) recording capacity of Interactor is equivalent to that of any conventional vinyl LP.

Nevertheless, Interactor represents an innovation over the conventional phonograph record in its unique use of random access tracks and multiple start-stop bands, a design for which the company has a patent pending.

For spoken-word recordings--the process does not appear practical for strictly musical applications--the Interactor can accommodate branching story lines to provide thousands of different combinations.

The process is immune to the scourge of the record industry: home taping.

The Interactor record, which won’t be marketed until the patent is approved, was developed over the last two years by Harvest Time, a research and development firm funded by venture capital.

“We wanted to make a toy that we would have liked when we were kids,” said William Knoke, Harvest Time’s vice president of marketing. “But in talking to some of the talent agencies, we’re finding all kinds of other potential uses.”

To make the Interactor record, a specially designed cutting lathe cuts three concentric spirals--each with a different recorded program--within every separate band, rather than the single continuous spiral groove on all standard records. When the needle is placed on any single band, one of three tracks will play at random.

Individual bands on the Interactor record are separated from one another by a narrow strip of vinyl without a groove, unlike conventional records in which bands are linked together with a continuous groove. For the record to continue, the listener must physically move the needle from one band to another, depending on what direction the story proceeds. With three different program tracks on each of seven bands on either side of the record, there are 42 different tracks that can be played in thousands of different story combinations.