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Today's Transport War: Significant Differences?

I have been reading much these days about computer/hard-drive based transports as being a whole order of magnitude superior to traditional CD transports. In my reading, the camp who believes hard-drive based transports can render major improvements has been most notably represented by Empirical Audio. The camp which suggests that traditional CD transport techonology (or atleast the best of its sort--VRDS-NEO) is still superior has been most notably represented by APL Hi-Fi.

Each of the camps mentioned above are genuine experts who have probably forgotten more about digital than many of us will ever understand. But my reading of each of their websites and comments they have made on various discussion threads (Audiogon, Audio Circle, and their own websites) suggests that they GENUINELY disagree about whether hard-drive based transportation of a digital signal really represents a categorical improvement in digital transport technology. And I am certain others on this site know a lot about this too.

I am NOT trying to set up a forum for a negative argument or an artificial either/or poll here. I want to understand the significant differences in the positions and better understand some of the technical reasons why there is such a significant difference of opinion on this. I am sincerely wondering what the crux of this difference is...the heart of the matter if you will.

I know experts in many fields and disciplines disagree with one another, and, I am not looking for resolution (well not philosophical resolution anyway) of these issues. I just want to better understand the arguments of whether hard-drive based digital transportation is a significant technical improvement over traditional CD transportation.

Respectfully,
pardales
seandtaylor99
1,262 posts
 
"The main difference of the Flash memory would be avoiding a spinning mechanical device and the problems inherent to these..."

I bet FLASH players and hard-drive players (and some CD-ROM based players, like meridian) actually play back via RAM, since they need to buffer and format data prior to transmission.

All can work well, but FLASH is currently disproportionately expensive.
osgorth
109 posts
 
Jsadurni: well, as Seandtaylor99 says, no matter which storage device you use, the data must hit the RAM first, since that's the only way to retrieve data off a hard drive, a flash card or whatever. They work as storage devices, so you read from them into a RAM buffer, and then you can forward it to the DAC or whatever you wish. :)

That's what I meant; I can't for the life in me understand how different storage devices would sound differently. IF there is a difference, it's got to be due to the implementation, e.g. what happens to the bits after being output from the RAM buffer.
jsadurni
210 posts
 
Osgorth, We will need then "titanium" buffers ;-) APL!!!

Almost all DVD transports use buffers since the reading speed is much faster, Squeezebox uses also buffers...even so: they all sound very different, some better some worst.

APL has modded from Phillips to Teac, going through almost all Denons...mods are similar but the results seem to be very different even though the data is coming actually from a buffer!!! Alex, can you clear this up?
osgorth
109 posts
 
Yeah, please Alex (or anybody), can you explain this? I'm lost! :)

I do understand that CD transports differ because data and clock is being transmitted in real time and are so suspectible to jitter. But reading from a storage device such as HD or Flash cards isn't done in realtime eh? The way I see it data is fed into a RAM buffer packet-wise as is normal in any computer, and clocked on the way out to the DAC - is this not so? If not, why not, and how is it done instead?
olesno
87 posts
 
Well, I am one of the fortunate owners of the Memory Player (for just about a week or so) and I will post my extended opinion on this unit in the near future. However, for now my impressions are as follows:
1. the sound - the best I've heard in my system, period. Nothing more to say.
2. the ease of operation - very easy, considering you are using it more as a PC than a regular player. Quite straight forward.
3. software (you need a laptop to operate the unit) - very rudimentary, I would call it a work in progress. It needs a lot of fine tunning to satisfy an average customer like myself. Once this is taken care of, the MP will be the audiophile king of the source components. I am betting on this.
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