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.
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