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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
audiogon_arnie
8 posts
 
Interesting idea, Kthomas. Myself and couple of guys at Audiogon had this same idea as well. We had assembled a lengthy dissertation on the benefits of this concept, and it was going to be part of "Multimedia" exploration. While it seems that audiophiles are not quite ready for multimedia, this concept could be a side effect of exploring the computer/audio integration.

For those of interest, please take a look at:
RamDac concept

The "Multimedia Site" itself is at:
Multimedia Initiative

We are getting close with this, as there are now real world products worth the consideration of audiophiles.
ehider
286 posts
 
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.
gunbei
2,327 posts
 
WOW! That's original. I like it. I make my living using Adobe Photoshop and greatly appreciate having the luxury of a one gig of RAM. It speeds up all functions greatly and reduces the need of constant writes to a hard drive.

Would there have to be any moving parts at all once the CD's information is stored in RAM?
jfrech's avatar
jfrech
1,816 posts
 
Doesn't Meridian do some of this today in their new cd players? They don't load the whole disk in, but enough to read the data out of memory to eleminate the jitter issues...
kthomas OP
911 posts
 
You can buy 256Mb RAM SIMMs for $140 or so apiece - since you'd need three, the maximum cost would be $420, but I'm sure the wholesale bulk cost would be decidedly less. At this point, it would be a definite cost addition to the machine, non-trivial to the point that it would only be appropriate for a high-end player.

However, I would think that it would eliminate a lot of cost associated with a high-quality transport section. I don't know much about what goes into making a high-end transport high-end, but I'm sure there's significant parts cost associated with it. Since you'd be separating the reading of the disc from the playback of the music, you wouldn't need all physical separation, so maybe at the end of the day it wouldn't be that much of an uptick in parts cost. Maybe it would ultimately cost less

I think most high-end players use one form of buffering or another towards the same goals, but the advantage I see here is buffering the whole disc, since that is what allows you to shut down the transport mechanically during playback, as well as removing all real-time aspects of data retrieval off the CD. As Gunbei suggests, there would be no moving parts during playback which removes a whole raft of noise issues. I think Pls1's calculation of about 2 minutes to load a CD is about right which, while not ideal, certainly isn't out of the question considering the lengths most audiophiles are willing to go to better the sound of their system. -Kirk

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