GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: Windows Based Transport: A quiet and capable Source?

Post Subject: Do you call your lawn mower as a digital transport”?Posted by Romy the Cat on: 11/3/2011

item wrote:
For future reference, in case anyone else is as confused as I am about the content of this thread; from the horse's mouth: the Item DAT1 could just about be considered a 'DAW' (the SPDIF version records analog, and you can run editing and mixing suites on it). However, it is a CD converter (it rips CDs to AIFF, WAV, FLAC, etc files). It is a CD player. Above all - it is a universal digital file player and streamer with onboard storage.

Any computer does absolute the same level of universality by being a digital file player. My telephone does it but I do not call my telephone a “digital transport”. Ripping CD it is not what your devise does but the free software that you use. So, any other PC would do it.

item wrote:
I have no further comment to make about such controversial or subjective matters, and I don't want to be seen to be promoting our machine: only to set the record straight about what it is and does.

No one prohibit you to make promotional statements but you need to live with consequences if your statements are not accurate or do not make any sense. In your commentary that content of audio CD is identical to a wav file and could be bit-for bit compared you went to pure world of fantasy.

item wrote:
It remains highly controversial whether the effect of on-the-fly decompression of lossless formats such as ALAC and FLAC create audible artefacts

Why is it controversial is in case of FLACing the bit-for bit comparing before and after is perfectly possible?

item wrote:
Having said that, there is some wriggle room for two identical rips to perform differently because of their different positions on the drive and possible fragmentation, resulting in a different pattern of interrupts and EM noise created by different patterns of drive read access. But again, many find this stretches the limits of plausibility.

Why you suddenly give a room to possibility of any wriggling if you insist that bit-for-bit comparing between audio CD and bit stream file is possible? If you have two digital cables with very different sound then are you sure that they will not pass your bit-for-bit test? What, do you think that one of the cables is just losing bits somewhere during transition?

item wrote:
The problem is that you can never made a level playing field comparison between a CD and its ripped clone, because the hardware is so instrumental in the performance of the transport.

yes, the hardware is very instrumental in the performance of the transport and you in your devise have no specialty hardware to be a transport. You stick in your PS $15 CD room drive and make EAC to rip the data from the disk. Absolutely any computer, including my TV, phone and perhaps a refrigerator can do it but I do not call them digital transports.

item wrote:
If you built a machine purely as a CD converter, it would be interesting to experiment with different power supplies to determine whether a higher number of errors get through the sieve when rail noise is higher. It has been well documented that different CD-ROM mechs create higher or lower read errors, and obviously these are not desirable, but from the playback viewpoint, once the file is encoded, the processor takes the file as read: it's not error checking against the CD.

Errors are absolute irrelevant. The EAC make you to be informed about error and all sales people begin to run mouth about errors. The data on CD is duplicated (multiple times in some cases) and the first level of error are the errors the might be recovered from different sectors. Some of the errors could not be recovered and there are different ways to deal with it. To talk about connection between the differences in PS and the error correction algorithms is like talking about connection between difference in results of multiplication table at different altitude above sea level.

item wrote:
Again, we're missing even the flimsiest theoretical framework for a mechanism by which one in a million bit errors during ripping can translate to any characteristic difference in the resultant file. Especially when we consider that during playback those micro rip 'errors' are not errors at all: they look like valid data.

Why suddenly you begin to talk about errors? Did you read something recently? You just was keep taking about direct bit-to-bit conversion between CD and file and insisted the it is as same as copy file between two patricians. Why suddenly “errors” became a new bid wolf. You need to read more or to ask somebody to explain it to you. The errors them are not a big deal and the errors are not the cause of the change in the sound that we hear with different transports. Again, talk to your magazine editor. They are very basic things and he shall be able to explain it to you. Writing those pretentious marketing proclamations you need at least to be informed what you saying.

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

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