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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
mateored
258 posts
 
Even a cheap-o Sony Discman can buffer about 40 seconds, I think, of information into memory. I'm not an engineer, but it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to read a whole CD into memory.
blues_man
133 posts
 
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.
jared
3 posts
 
Great idea but I will give you one word why it would never happen-- PIRACY. If you could upload the entire disk into the machines RAM, then it wouldn't be too hard for some criminal mind to figure out how to tap into the memory to make excellent copies of the disk. All that said, maybe they could develop some type of manner of preventing this but look how successful they have been preventing piracy to date i.e. almost not at all. It is this fear of piracy that would prevent your excellent audiophile idea from becoming a reality at least in the near term

Jared
deven8
81 posts
 
Isnt this similar to what you are talking about the Knekt Kivor System  by LINN.
http://www.linn.co.uk/spec_sound/products.cfm?range=Knekt#136
blues_man
133 posts
 
This would be one of the easiest things to pirate, and maybe that's why the CD mechanism was set up that way 20 years ago. I'm sure you can already do this now though with regular CDs. When the music industry decided on digital, they probably figured that since it costs a small fraction of what it costs to produce LPs, they would make enough to pay for piracy.
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