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.
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
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- 21 posts total
- 21 posts total