Nilthepill - you have it exactly backwards. Spinning optical disks have both timing and data information being read from them. This affects both the data integrity (error rate) and the timing (jitter) during playback.
The hard-disk only copies the data from the CD, no timing, and it does multiple reads to make sure there are no errors. Then, the computer on playback retrieves the data from disk, caches it in memory and spools it out either over USB, Firewire or networked.
In the networked case, ala Squezebox, the data is simply data, there is no timing information added until the data is stored in a buffer and reassembled inside the squeezebox. This makes a perfect playback source. The local clock reads the data out of the buffer with very low jitter clock(assuming a low-jitter clock is used.
This is far superior to reading a spinning optical disk on-the-fly.
Steve N.
Principal Engineer
Empirical Audio
The hard-disk only copies the data from the CD, no timing, and it does multiple reads to make sure there are no errors. Then, the computer on playback retrieves the data from disk, caches it in memory and spools it out either over USB, Firewire or networked.
In the networked case, ala Squezebox, the data is simply data, there is no timing information added until the data is stored in a buffer and reassembled inside the squeezebox. This makes a perfect playback source. The local clock reads the data out of the buffer with very low jitter clock(assuming a low-jitter clock is used.
This is far superior to reading a spinning optical disk on-the-fly.
Steve N.
Principal Engineer
Empirical Audio