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New Transport Approach

With never-ending advances in technology and tumbling prices, I wonder if any high-end audio CD player manufacturer is considering an approach such as this - populate the player with 700 megabytes of RAM and pre-read the whole CD into RAM. We know this is completely reliable (or else our beloved MS Office wouldn't work). Then the whole transport system could be shut down, eliminating any concerns about mechanical or electrical noise, and the "CD" could be played back straight from RAM through the DAC. It would seem like this would reduce or eliminate jitter completely. There would be an "initialization" time penalty, but I would think for the high-end market, that wouldn't be a huge deal. Any thoughts? -Kirk
kthomas
mdorsam
58 posts
 
I've been holding off buying a CD/DVD player for this very reason: I expect this read-from-memory to be about a year from now.

Meridian does do the seminal portion of this concept: its FIFO buffering through multiple processors allows multiple reads of the source, then actually pushes the music through the preamp from ROM. Perhaps, this is why they recently moved from a standard CD Transport to a computer CD mechanism.

Regardless of why; to me the when is more the matter. My recommendation is to NOT upgrade your CD/DVD player until this technology is here: it is an idea waiting to happen.
mateored
258 posts
 
Even a cheap-o Sony Discman can buffer about 40 seconds, I think, of information into memory. I'm not an engineer, but it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to read a whole CD into memory.
blues_man
133 posts
 
These methods are not new. They've just not been done with CDs. Two of my systems used this. One allowed you to preview CDs in the store and had tens of thousands of songs. Sampling was at 32kHz if I recall. Another system was used by a Jazz magazine to let people preview Jazz CDs over the phone. This had an even lower sampling rate and didn't sound too good. It was worse than MP3. There are different problems with CDs. You would think this would be simple but you end up taking a long time to load or you have to solve logistics problems when bit errors pile up and your buffer cache goes down. Nether one would be easy to push past marketing department.
jared
3 posts
 
Great idea but I will give you one word why it would never happen-- PIRACY. If you could upload the entire disk into the machines RAM, then it wouldn't be too hard for some criminal mind to figure out how to tap into the memory to make excellent copies of the disk. All that said, maybe they could develop some type of manner of preventing this but look how successful they have been preventing piracy to date i.e. almost not at all. It is this fear of piracy that would prevent your excellent audiophile idea from becoming a reality at least in the near term

Jared
deven8
77 posts
 
Isnt this similar to what you are talking about the Knekt Kivor System  by LINN.
http://www.linn.co.uk/spec_sound/products.cfm?range=Knekt#136
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