has anyone tried PS Audio perfect wave duo

Al and Mapman,

What the Perfect Wave Disc player does is read data off the disk like a computer - not a CD player. That is, will re-read sectors if there is an error until it gets it right rather than a one-pass stream that a CD player does. It essentially achieves the benefit of a file based transport with a disc based one and assures that the data is always perfect. Also, it can do pretty much any format including file based formats on DVD (which is how many of the new high res formats are being distributed).

Combined, the main benefit of the two pieces is all about avoiding the hallmark problem areas of typical disc players and DACs. By "ripping" the data like a computer, the disc player gets the data correct to begin with. By keeping it in I2S format all the way to the DAC chip, it keeps it perfect. No error correction, no jitter, no re-clocking of digital stream data, no latency problems. Basically, what we have been spending thousands on for Pace Cars and re-clocker mods and such is no longer necessary.

Everything I've seen and heard thus far tells me it's pretty much the best "technology" out there. The real question I think is whether you like the sonic quality of the DAC or not. It would be nice if a standardized I2S interface could emerge for transport devices and DACs so we can replace the error prone SPDif, Toslink, and USB ones. The clever use of the HDMI hardware might just be the ticket.

Shazam,

I was under the impression that most optical drives, audio or computer, do rereads of data normally when errors are detected? I didn't think most modern CD players were one pass only because frankly there would seem to be no reason for them to suffer with that limitation.

Thanks for the good explanations, Shazam. You should replace whoever writes their literature!

I do agree that the file-based read, and the I2S interface (which avoids multiplexing the data and clocks together) sound like excellent approaches. Hopefully, as you say, the I2S approach, or something similar, will be adopted by others.

What I was taking exception to as misleading, though, is exemplified by this paragraph at their site, in the description of the transport:

In a standard CD player or Transport, the master clock is synchronized to the optical disc reading mechanism. This means you are basically relying on a mechanical spinning mechanism and all of its correction systems to give you a perfectly stable, fixed clock to feed the DAC. It does not work and it is not stable.

Here's the problem. Optical disc readers are constantly changing the rate at which the data is coming from the disc. Sometimes it comes faster and sometimes it comes slower than the fixed speed of an asynchronous clock. If that data is coming in faster than the clock, you get a traffic pileup and the system crashes. Too slow and nothing comes out.

The Digital Lens has a large and smart memory storage buffer. It's big enough to handle any speed variation of the optical disc reader.

That would appear to indicate that in other transports and players the timing of data to the dac is subject to fluctuation identical to the fluctuating timing of the data coming off of the disk. It was sufficiently misleading, in fact, to have apparently misled one of our most intelligent and experienced members, with whom I was having the discussion above. :)

Best regards,
-- Al

I am a PS Audio dealer and am anxiously awaiting the demo set to be brought by from the rep firm who is local. When I have actually heard the set in my system I will give a report based on comparison to my current reference room demo set of the Bel Canto dac3 and CD2 combination.

I agree that the literature is poorly written and doesn't explain it well. I actually spent a good 30 minutes in the PS Audio room at the RMAF last fall chatting with Paul and others about the technology and I think I understand it pretty well.

A typical CD player does have a buffer, but it basically amounts to a fraction of a second in most cases (good players will have a second or more). This is to allow for the variations in spin speed and movement of the laser changing the timing data being pulled off the disk. So long as the data pull stays within the margin of the buffer you are fine in this regard. But pull too much data and the buffer doesn't have room for it (buffer over run). Pull not enough data and the buffer empties out and the digital stream stops (buffer under run). This is basically the second paragraph Al quotes above.

The Perfect Wave has a significantly larger buffer which provides much more room for error. Let's say the PW holds a minute worth of music and begins to generate the digital stream when it is half full. This gives the laser 30 seconds either way to keep the buffer filled with enough data to keep music going.

The second part of the equation, however, is the important one. A CD laser is a single pass reader and uses error correction (ECC) to try to clean up dropped sectors - it has one chance to get it right and one chance to clean it up (with imperfect correction data no less). The PW laser operates like a computer drive, which will read a sector multiple times if necessary to assure it has the data right. If you read up on the technology in the ripping software Exact Audio Copy (EAC), you will get a better understanding of the principle at work here. In fact, if I heard Paul correctly, the PW actually uses EAC to read the disk and generate the buffer.

The CD player has to spin at a constant rate that basically reflects the stream rate (this is "1x" speed in CD-Rom speak). The Perfect Wave can spin up significantly faster because it's building a significanlty bigger buffer data file (think a CD-Rom that runs at "16x" or "24x" speed). This is how, when they demo the player, they will eject the disk after about 30 seconds and the music continues. The PW is capable of pulling the data much faster because it is acting like a computer drive to create what amounts to a file, which is then turned into the digital stream.

Finally, the PW generates the digital stream like any other CD player, but if you take the stream out to the PW DAC, it keeps it in I2S format all the way to the DAC chip. A traditional transport device must convert the stream to a different format to accomodate Toslink, SPDiff, or USB, and then the DAC converts it back to I2S to send to the DAC chip. By doing this, all sorts of timing errors and re-clocking problems are introduced which creates jitter and hash. This is where we spend money on external re-clockers (like the Pace Car) to better manage this process. Using the PW combo eliminates this problem because the data is always in the optimal I2S format.

Does that make sense?