Mike Hanson Wrote: > This explains why different transports, assuming they're all "good > enough", won't sound appreciably different.
Agreed - once it's in digital land, it's only a matter of having no errors (jitter doesn't count BTW; that's really an analog phenomenon). However, the thing about an opto/mechanical (CD) transport is that you have to deal with how well the, uh, transport itself is working - and that's a real-world error-prone process involving light, motors, and quite fragile media. I have several real-life, perfectly reproducible cases where a slightly scratched CD plays fine in one player, and with skips/clicks in another. On a CD with even the most utterly microsocopic imperfections (even a brand new one), you'll find one transport plays it with more errors than another. Impercipble to the ear, maybe, (a single bad sample just gets interpolated) but it's not digital perfection. SB2 does have quite an "unfair" advantage in that our "transport" simply doesn't have to deal with frequent read errors. As long as the hard drive is functioning and the network is fast enough, it just works. There is a simple but time-consuming empirical test you could do (maybe I'll try this if nobody else has), which is to simply measure the bit error rate of various CD transports. Then you want to compare the output from a good ripper, say EAC, which I expect would outperform any audio CD player. The reason I say that is because a ripper is not encumbered by real-time constraints, and can take as long as it likes to retry a particular read attempt until it gets the best possible data. -- seanadams _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
