Why CD players will never be dead

Would someone care to weigh in on the PSAudio Perfect Wave memory player? It may not be better than computer audio files that never touched a disc, but I've found it to be equal to anything ripped from a disc and then fed to a DAC. Here's why: The PW player uploads the data from a disc into a buffer and then the data is transmitted bit perfect to the PW DAC via an I2S interface.

I just came from the PSAudio site and boy, do I wish I were rich.

Someday.

I haven't used many audio rippers but with EAC it tells you how many errors are in the rip and if any error correction was used. However, 99% of my audio ripping has never required error correction to be applied. Even with high speed ripping.

My friend who is a tech support engineer (for customers who design equipment) at sanyo, supporting cd rom products has said that bit perfect reads are common place now.

Imagine, if reading a cd is hard, how much error correction would be needed for sacd or blu ray? It just doesn't make sense to assume that a cd drive at 1x speed can't accurately read a cd when a cd-rom drive at 2x or higher can without correction.

Some things in that 6moons article may be right such as power supply affecting servo and diodes (which can be mitigated with proper design)But I'd have to argue that cd is digital. It is, afterall, a representation of a decimated signal that came out of an ADC.

Having said all that, I don't believe that anyone knows why digital can sound different - transports, digital IC's if anyone is interested. The only parameter we know of is jitter to explain differences after accepting the bit perfect argument. Which is why hifi manufacturers don't want us to think that.

well steve, if you think my cd player will sound inferior to your transport and some dac, put your money where your mouth is.

as you realize there is no accounting for taste.

you cannot make a definitive statement that one component sounds better than another, because the null hypothesis will be rejected if one person prefers a cd player.

"To Steve (Audioengr) or anyone else inclined to explain...How is it possible for a copy of a CD played from a computer hard drive to sound better than the original CD?"

Okay, simple. The jitter that is caused by the pits in the CD and their unevenness makes it worse than playing back using sync USB interface or networked interface.

This is easy to test. First rip a CD track using either XLD on Mac or dbpoweramp on PC with Accurate-Rip enabled. Then rewrite a CD onto 2 different CDROM blanks, one Mitsui Gold audio master and the other TDK or equivalent. Then play all three disks on the CD player. If any of them sounds different, then there you have the proof. If you argue that the rip is different, then listen for differences in the 2 CDROMS. If you hear any difference, then ther is your proof. The CD player jitter is affected by the pits on the disk.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio