This can be done, and indeed was done for an ancient photograph of an ancient record that no longer existed. In that case I think they used some photoshop magic to ‘unspiral’ the groove and something else to decode the image. The result wasn’t super high quality.
Vinyl starts as a poor material for recording music and only gets worse with age and use. Take a picture if it on old film and develop it with old techniques, and you end up with the worst possible recording medium. I'm impressed they got anything from it.
There's at least a plausible interpretation of your earlier comment that the attempt was futile or without merits.
The OP makes clear that this was the only viable way of extracting information. 1 >>> 0.
Also, as a sufficiently early recording (anything before the mid-1940s), the medium would have been shellac or wax rather than vinyl. Shellac especially is immensely fragile and prone to shatter when handling.
I worked on an earlier version of this project where we actually had to play the albums but we also took high res (300 dpi tifs) of the individual records with the hope that we'd never have to physically touch them again. So I'll claim contributing to this effort. ;)
"It looks like somebody just got hungry and took a bite out of it," says Haber. He has positioned the record on a turntable and fitted the broken piece back into place, like it's a jigsaw puzzle. "If we spun this thing fast, the piece would come flying off, you know, and maybe hit somebody," he says.
In that particular case, definitely. More generally, it's risk.
Every time an archivist touches the media - no matter gloves, a clean environment, the care applied, etc - there's a risk of altering or even damaging it. In our case, the eventual goal was to keep the ever-deteriorating originals in nitrogen-filled vaults.
Therefore, if you can avoid having to touch it often (or ever), then you've managed to protect it better, probably longer, and more cheaply.
