hasenpfeffer wrote:
I have never quite understood the philosophy behind $5K players. They
usually are very heavy, shock absorption everywhere, heavy heavy
transport, solid mechanisms, exotic materials and what have you. A
lot of money is being spent on a superior design with, as far as I
can tell, the goal to read the CD without any bit errors. And that's
fine. But, wouldn't it be cheaper and better to take a 48x CD rom
drive, read the material a few times as soon as the CD is inserted,
compare the digital data, error check and what have you, store the
data in memory which is not prone to errors due to vibrations and
play it back from a memory buffer? Especially when taking a fast CD
Rom, the data can be read many times and compared and checked and
errors can be eliminated while the CD is playing. No need to have a
real time stream that can have errors directly from the optical
pick-up element in the CD player to the output of the DAC. The player
could even let you know exactly when there is a read-out error on the
CD that can't be corrected. I would say a design like that is
superior to an on-the-fly processing type CD player, and can achieve
lower bit error rates, most likely completely eliminating errors
while under $1K, even with enough RAM to store the entire CD content.


This is what ExactAudioCopy does, a free downloadable PC-program. To find
the right settings I experimented with read speeds and error correction by
multiple reading. My results with a cheap AOpen52x burner (27 Euro) were
very promising. Even at maximum speed single read, on almost all CDs that i
tried, there was not a single bit different from 4x read at 4times speed, so
there doesn't seem the need for multiple reads. One home-burnt CDRom of bad
quality media would make a difference, in the fast read mode there were
several "jumps" and muted passages, 3 titles were drpped etc., which still
came out on the paranoid setting.
--
ciao Ban
Bordighera, Italy