Mike Rivers wrote:

Still, there are only a few manufacturers of disk
transport
mechanisms, and they've gotta use one of those. That's the
most
vulnerable part. Switches rarely fail because so many
people, even in
industrial and broadcast applications, use remote control.
So the
question is - how do you make them sound bettter? Good
sounding D/A
converter chips are cheap so there's no reason not to use
a good one.
But what makes a difference is a good power supply, good
analog
design, and good engineering to keep the digital and
analog parts from
interfering with each other.

Case in point is HHB's CDR 830 *professional* CD recorder,
which I recently purchased for my church for about $600.

Word has it that the guts of the HHB are actually an Aiwa
consumer CD recorder that runs a couple of $100's. Not a
couple of $100s less, the comparable consumer box is just a
couple of $100s.

I suspect that most know that the functional difference
between a professional and consumer CD recorder is primarily
a few lines of code in the firmware that tells the box to
not take the absence of some bits on the raw media too
seriously.

At any rate I didn't spring for the optional-extra balanced
I/O option on the HHB box because the long term use will be
digital domain I/O. FWIW it interfaces to my Mackie analog
console just swimmingly with no problems with hum or noise.

anahata wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:

the computer
CD drives are much crappier and tend to have much higher
error rates
than the audio drives, because they can get away with it.

I'm not too sure about that.

You're not alone. In some cases high-end CD players have
been based on transports that were origionally designed for
computer use.

When they are used for computer data they
have to be error free in the data seen by the computer. I
do
appreciate that in CD-ROM mode the error correction
mechanism is
stronger and the re-reading the data is an option, but you
have
somehow to get a good enough copy of the data to be able
to correct
the errors. Because they are produced in large numbers
they are
cheap, but that doesn't necessarily mean thay are crappy.

Agreed.

A much more likely difference is that computer CD drives
will have the
cheapest possible 1-chip solution for analog audio output.

Agreed. However, even the audio quality of this chip has
been going through slow steady upgrades.