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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
blueswan
211 posts
 
Kirk, I like your suggestion. With the entire disc in RAM, any number of processing algorithms and could be applied and perhaps a substantial decrease in jitter when the signal is clocked out to the DAC directly. There would also be instantaneous track and search capabilites. But, alas we live in a 'I gotta have it right now' world and any buffering induced delay is not likely to be acceptable to the general population. Perhaps the audiophile community could support such a player. The huge advances in RAM the last 5 years may make this a possibilty. In the meantime, I like the multiple DAC approach of Accuphase in the DP-75V, but few of us can shell out its $11k price tag.

By the way, how long a delay are we talking about? Does anyone know how long it would take to read 700 meg to RAM from a CD-ROM on the best available disc drives?
pls1
432 posts
 
I took a quick look and the fastest currently available standard CD-ROM reader with standard error correction is 40x. This would mean about 2 minutes of latency.

Another advantage of this approach would be to apply proprietary error correction on the read head based on allowing for retry.
audiogon_arnie
8 posts
 
Interesting idea, Kthomas. Myself and couple of guys at Audiogon had this same idea as well. We had assembled a lengthy dissertation on the benefits of this concept, and it was going to be part of "Multimedia" exploration. While it seems that audiophiles are not quite ready for multimedia, this concept could be a side effect of exploring the computer/audio integration.

For those of interest, please take a look at:
RamDac concept

The "Multimedia Site" itself is at:
Multimedia Initiative

We are getting close with this, as there are now real world products worth the consideration of audiophiles.
ehider
286 posts
 
Great idea! Have you estimated the build of materials cost? I know of a couple of high end manufacturers that offer cd players which retail for $2500.00. Their total build of material cost is about $600.00. This example should help you calculate an approximate end retail cost of the RAM based unit, if it were offered by a high end company.
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