Half the information on CDs is analogue

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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Exlibris,

I am afraid the IAR stuff does not agree at all with mathematics and science.

There are indeed many deficiencies in digital, it is far from perfect;

- proper filtering must be applied in the studio prior to digitizing a signal in order to avoid aliasing (stuff that is not filtered folds in around the Nyquist frequency).

- high out of band noise is common on most DAC's and must be heavily filtered (this is not ideal but generally not a problem for well designed gear with oversampling etc.)

- clock jitter can affect sound particularly if the jitter is not random. (again proper design has corrected this in most, if not all, commonly available gear)

Contrary to IAR, the details in the waveform are NOT lost in digital. In fact they are preserved much much more precisely than analog.....way better S/(THD+N) and way better channel separation.

If you don't believe it then STOP using your COMPUTER now .....becuase it is ALL based on similar technology....your disc drive uses Solomon Reed type algorthims too!!!! Almost all digital technology uses these concepts to make digital copies extremely accurate.....1000's of identical copies can be made with never a single error.

In fact digital is so good that the whole entertainment industry is scared of how downloading and piracy of digital data can undermine the control of legal distribution of high quality music and video.

In fact digital or binary type coding is so good that it forms the basis for all lifeforms that we know of on this planet! Yep, your DNA is basically a digital coded string in the form of a double helix - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_helix

The genetic code consists of three-letter 'words' (termed a codon) formed from a sequence of three nucleotides (e.g. ACT, CAG, TTT). These codons can then be translated with messenger RNA and then transfer RNA, with a codon corresponding to a particular amino acid. There are 64 possible codons (4 bases in 3 places or 4*4*4 possible "digital" states) that encode 20 amino acids. Most amino acids, therefore, have more than one possible codon. There are also three 'stop' or 'nonsense' codons signifying the end of the coding region, namely the UAA, UGA and UAG codons.

DNA does not appear to use Solomon Reed encoding but it is very robust digital code, such that every cell in your body contains the same digital information, which is why cloning is possible....something way scarier than music piracy, IMHO.

It's odd that something so perfect usually sounds so bad.

In some metaphysical sense there is no real distinction between analog and digital information, but practically speaking, particularly if we exclude the printed info on the CD disc/packing, 100% of the data (music) contained on a CD is digitally encoded. I honestly don't see how someone can get so confused on this issue.

I'm just trying to figure out why there is such a huge difference in the sound of various transports.