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Today's Transport War: Significant Differences?

I have been reading much these days about computer/hard-drive based transports as being a whole order of magnitude superior to traditional CD transports. In my reading, the camp who believes hard-drive based transports can render major improvements has been most notably represented by Empirical Audio. The camp which suggests that traditional CD transport techonology (or atleast the best of its sort--VRDS-NEO) is still superior has been most notably represented by APL Hi-Fi.

Each of the camps mentioned above are genuine experts who have probably forgotten more about digital than many of us will ever understand. But my reading of each of their websites and comments they have made on various discussion threads (Audiogon, Audio Circle, and their own websites) suggests that they GENUINELY disagree about whether hard-drive based transportation of a digital signal really represents a categorical improvement in digital transport technology. And I am certain others on this site know a lot about this too.

I am NOT trying to set up a forum for a negative argument or an artificial either/or poll here. I want to understand the significant differences in the positions and better understand some of the technical reasons why there is such a significant difference of opinion on this. I am sincerely wondering what the crux of this difference is...the heart of the matter if you will.

I know experts in many fields and disciplines disagree with one another, and, I am not looking for resolution (well not philosophical resolution anyway) of these issues. I just want to better understand the arguments of whether hard-drive based digital transportation is a significant technical improvement over traditional CD transportation.

Respectfully,
pardales
theaudiotweak
1,793 posts
 
Grant a friend of mine whose products were on display at RMAF was brought down the Nova Memory Player you mentioned above. He heard this player on his system setup at the show after hours. The Nova player was compared heads up to the 10k player they were using in their listening room..he said he wants to purchase the Nova..The copy he made on the Nova and then played back on the other player sounded much better than the original cd played back on either machine. Electro mechanical jitter error correction all of that the Nova guys claim is pretty much gone.Playback from the memory chip internal of the Nova player is even better yet. The Melos crew is back! I recently purchased an Altmann Dac from Germany. Sounds wonderful. Altmann claims with his circuit redo's that the transport makes little or no difference..my listening comparisons so far are making me listen and look harder at transports differences when played thru this little 12volt wonder.Tom
jeff_jones
418 posts
 
Seandtaylor99 - Thanks for the link, interesting read.
jsadurni
210 posts
 
Almost all DAC manufacturers will tell you transport doesnt matter, EAD manfacturer told me the same, because of the digital-flywheel thingy, Transport is very impotant I would say even more than DAC...

I guess If you destroy the original signal (say in a bad computer or a crappy DVD player) and then reconstruct it on the DAC, the result is not the same as if the signal is kept complete (as much as possible) from transport to DAC.

Thanks for that post Alex, it clears up a lot of things for me.

I hope the Nova memory player is indeed much better than a 10k transport, if that is the case we can say good bye to vinil, I hope its not just the next SACD!!!
seandtaylor99
1,262 posts
 
"I guess If you destroy the original signal (say in a bad computer or a crappy DVD player) and then reconstruct it on the DAC, the result is not the same as if the signal is kept complete (as much as possible) from transport to DAC. "

How are you destroying the signal ? The digital signal is nothing more than 1s, 0s and timing information. I'll bet that even the crappiest DVD player's digital output has 1s and 0s that EXACTLY match even the most expensive transport. The $20 DVD-ROM drive in my PC seems able to extract and install windows XP without a single bit error, and it can do this while reading the CD many times faster than an audio CD has to be read.

A computer is quite evidently capable of preserving the 1s and 0s, since it's able to install an operating system from a CD-ROM. The computer might have jitter and noise on the output, but it's not rocket science to buffer and reclock data, to completely remove the timing jitter from the computer.
theaudiotweak
1,793 posts
 
Js I agree that the transport sound can be even more important than the Dac...well maybe until this Altmann piece. I need to try some other drives to know for sure. I'm always in search of something better but right now this dac with a JVC dvd player sounds better than my last two rigs. Always in progress/I hope..Tom
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