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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
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
"Hopefully in the future the time will come when proper technology will be developed so one is able to load favorite music onto a computer based audio solutions and play it back while achieving the same audio quality as with the classic dedicated stand alone digital front-end is possible today"

I'm more than optimistic. I'm already there.

Steve N.
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
"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."

Exactly my point. It is easier to do this with a computer because the data can be fed in a number of different ways that lend themselves to buffering and reclocking. The data is not necessarily coming on-the-fly like it is from a CD spinning at the native rate. You cannot re-read a block of data on a CD or read-ahead at high-speed and store the data in blocks. You have to provide the data on the first pass and continuously without breaks in real-time. If a CD-player is doing buffering and high-speed transfers of blocks of data, then it is actually a computer-based CD system, not a classical CDP at all.

Steve N.
pardales OP
652 posts
 
Steve N.: "If a CD-player is doing buffering and high-speed transfers of blocks of data, then it is actually a computer-based CD system, not a classical CDP at all."

I guess this might be what I really want to know. Is it evolution, or, maybe convergence of technologies?" What would really be a classical, digital transport?

If we look at this, it may help us see where this is going...
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
Pardales - A CD-Rom based CD player is actually just a computer-based system. Maybe we are arguing semantics. I believe what Alex is arguing is something entirely different though. I just cannot figure out what it is....

Steve N.
cics
43 posts
 
What is Jitter? is an interesting read and offers a good reason for why transports sound so different.

I have setup a computer transport with great success. Its easy to get started but more effort/learning is needed to get best performance. After comparing my setup with some exotic (& very expensive) front-ends (Wadia 9 series, Esoteric P03/D03 & MBL Ref trans/DAC), I don't have a need to upgrade. Sound is superior to Wadia (bad dealer setup most likely here) & Esoteric (detailed but lacks musicality). MBL was excellent and couldn't be faulted but I don't need it.

It seems that computers are far better at upsampling than hardware based algorithms within a transport and/or dac. Upsampling after all is a computing function and doing it correctly, needs lots of processing power.
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