I hope you don't if I don't respond point by point, but I will respond to two or three.
A billet aluminum chassis is one of the very best shields of RFI and EMI radiation. In digital components or analog components placed near digital components RFI and EMI can degrade performance seriously. A great billet chassis cost the maker several hundred dollars each, excluding development time.
In optical readers, just like in analog, damping and stability of the transport is important. The fact is optical readers do NOT capture all the bits. Because of that, error correction is needed and the quality of the error correction can vary greatly. (Thus, hard drive based musical servers actually sound better than many optical systems). I won't go into jitter and clocking errors, but those are critcal to the ultimate sound. Anyway, just focusing on the transport, a generic piece as you'd find in an Oppo is under $50, while the very best is several hundred dollars. Just like in analog, the op amps, transformers and circuitboard quality all have a clear impact on sound.
Thoughout digital, each part has a generic, functional part that's $10 to $50 and a high end part that does the same thing, better, for several hundred dollars. It's easy to do a cost comparison and get up to a few thousand dollars.
Getting to $10,000 or $20,000 is all about the designer's implementation of all the pieces in such a way that it's better than the competition, as judged by sound. It's kind of like a Linn turntable. You can't justify the price by it's relatively inexpensive parts that have only slightly changed over the last 30-years. I'm sure you can think of a $10 piece that Linn improved their TT with and charged $500 for it, at least so long as it took for someone to come out with an alternative part for less.
There are at least a half dozen approaches to TT design. You can see the differences and they're relatively obvious. With a digital device there are just as many options to solving the problem of good sound, but they're way less obvious to us non-designers; therefore, we listen and make our decisions based on sound.
I don't think there is an absolute limit of sound quality possible with CD, but we're fast approaching the level of where it matches analog in the qualities that we analog lovers hold dear. We're just now reaching that limit with the expensive machines. I predict that Moore's law will make sub-$5000 machines available within 2-years that match and/or surpass today's $10,000 and over machines.
I didn't want to wait two years, so I went ahead and spent the bucks.
Dave
A billet aluminum chassis is one of the very best shields of RFI and EMI radiation. In digital components or analog components placed near digital components RFI and EMI can degrade performance seriously. A great billet chassis cost the maker several hundred dollars each, excluding development time.
In optical readers, just like in analog, damping and stability of the transport is important. The fact is optical readers do NOT capture all the bits. Because of that, error correction is needed and the quality of the error correction can vary greatly. (Thus, hard drive based musical servers actually sound better than many optical systems). I won't go into jitter and clocking errors, but those are critcal to the ultimate sound. Anyway, just focusing on the transport, a generic piece as you'd find in an Oppo is under $50, while the very best is several hundred dollars. Just like in analog, the op amps, transformers and circuitboard quality all have a clear impact on sound.
Thoughout digital, each part has a generic, functional part that's $10 to $50 and a high end part that does the same thing, better, for several hundred dollars. It's easy to do a cost comparison and get up to a few thousand dollars.
Getting to $10,000 or $20,000 is all about the designer's implementation of all the pieces in such a way that it's better than the competition, as judged by sound. It's kind of like a Linn turntable. You can't justify the price by it's relatively inexpensive parts that have only slightly changed over the last 30-years. I'm sure you can think of a $10 piece that Linn improved their TT with and charged $500 for it, at least so long as it took for someone to come out with an alternative part for less.
There are at least a half dozen approaches to TT design. You can see the differences and they're relatively obvious. With a digital device there are just as many options to solving the problem of good sound, but they're way less obvious to us non-designers; therefore, we listen and make our decisions based on sound.
I don't think there is an absolute limit of sound quality possible with CD, but we're fast approaching the level of where it matches analog in the qualities that we analog lovers hold dear. We're just now reaching that limit with the expensive machines. I predict that Moore's law will make sub-$5000 machines available within 2-years that match and/or surpass today's $10,000 and over machines.
I didn't want to wait two years, so I went ahead and spent the bucks.
Dave
