Half the information on CDs is analogue


I would like to argue that one of the reasons that some transports sound significantly better than others is because much of the information on a given CD is actually analogue (analog) information.
An excellent transport does not just read digital information: 1s and 0s (offs and ons); it must be sensitive enough to pick up the other information that has been stored as a physical property of the CD medium. This 'physical' information, like the tiny bumps in the groove of a vinyl record, is analogue information.

Before I say more I'd like to hear what others think.
exlibris
Put your CD player on top of your speaker and listen to how wonderful error correction sounds.
Using a mathematical algorithm to fill in gaps and help plot a wave by taking 'best guesses' sounds exactly how you'd expect it sound.

http://www.iar-80.com/page54.html
Exlibris...Your mention of "gaps" and "best guesses" indicates that you have no idea how R-S error correction encoding works. Go study!!
From the wiki link:
"In the same sense that one can correct a curve by interpolating past a gap, a Reed-Solomon code can bridge a series of errors in a block of data to recover the coefficients of the polynomial that drew the original curve."
Bob Reynolds: I adamantly believe that transports have a sound of their own. Whether or not they are discernable has to do with how different they sound and / or the resolution of the rest of the system and / or one's hearing acuity.

My Brother and i have conducted testing using several different transports. Some of the differences were not only quite audible, but quite staggering as far as how different the same discs sounded with the transports being the only variable. We were even using impedance matched cabling, so RF based digital reflections that cause jitter were taken out of the picture.

There was something else that we both learned while doing this. The primary sonic characteristic that we heard from each of the players ( when being used as a player ) were also prominent when using them strictly as a transport. When a machine sounded warm and round as a player, it also sounded warm and round as a transport, etc...

As such, the only logical thing to surmise from all of this was that the transport mechanism, laser assembly, power supply circuitry, digital correction circuitry, etc... contributes a LOT more of what we hear than what most people think. Sean
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