The CD player is dead.......

Devilboy,
Don`t forget that you still need to use some transport to load and rip your CD-s in to your hard drive. This all involves additional jitter and other problems. What transport you use to load your music in to HD? Cheap plastic PC, MAC or some state of the art Esoteric transport?

Egads! It's like telling the Borg, "thanks, but no-thanks, I prefer keeping my CD's if you don't mind"! Just before the implants ravage your body. There is nothing like being absorbed, and losing all sense of individuality. All of this while in the background someone prattles on about PC's,MAC'S, and Transports. Glorious oblivion to any humanity or mercy. Listening to automaton's on the way to becoming one yourself. Mindless, Spiritualess, absence any heart or emotion. Apparently the War between Man and Machine was fought decades ago, and we lost. The Enemy has met and defeated us, and now we are slowly being converted into them! We are ending up with wires and circuits where our Hearts and Minds should be. Sad!

PO, you seem dead stuck on your 90%. When shown wrong with a referenced source, you declare numbers "irrelevant." Then you call everything else "propaganda" and then you're back to your "90%." Nice circle.

I see you love a good conspiracy theory and you've settled on yours, damn the facts. "They" are just out to get you!

I can see you're having a grand time wallowing in your misery, so enjoy! (And go buy a few CDs while you still can.)

Plutos: "Don`t forget that you still need to use some transport to load and rip your CD-s in to your hard drive. This all involves additional jitter and other problems."

Jitter only occurs during the actual decoding step, when the digital is transferred to analog. Until then, it is just another data file and you can move it around all you want. (It was certainly transferred multiple times on hard drives at the studio and production plant prior to becoming a CD.)

The only issue with a poor drive would be a read error, but that is not jitter. Read errors on CD are mainly an issue only if the CD is damaged or defective. Read errors on a disc in good condition are fairly rare (or no computer program would ever install and run.)

Most computer drives will read a disc multiple times to get rid of errors. Many CD players differ from computers in they only get one shot to read a disc correctly since the data is delivered in real time.

Mlsstl,

Jitter only occurs during the actual decoding step, when the digital is transferred to analog. Until then, it is just another data file and you can move it around all you want. (It was certainly transferred multiple times on hard drives at the studio and production plant prior to becoming a CD.)

So, in your opinion, $19.95 Pioneer universal player transport (for example) and $6000 Esoteric VRDS-NEO transport jitter is the same? It is just another data file you can move around? Bits are bits? :-) Please keep in mind that the above mentioned transports are both spinning CD at x4 while filling-up SDRAM, so the laser can go and re-read any missing info if needed. But somehow, those two example transports sound completely different, while both pumping "bit perfect", "jitter-free" and "error-free" data to the digital output. Interesting!

The only issue with a poor drive would be a read error, but that is not jitter. Read errors on CD are mainly an issue only if the CD is damaged or defective. Read errors on a disc in good condition are fairly rare (or no computer program would ever install and run.)

Sure, you are perfectly right about that; even a boombox CD drive doesn't come up with any errors if the CD is clean. But how does it sound?

Most computer drives will read a disc multiple times to get rid of errors. Many CD players differ from computers in they only get one shot to read a disc correctly since the data is delivered in real time.

While you are correct when it comes to some rare old "classic" CD drives, most of the current disc-spinning transports found even in the cheapest universal players, spin the CD at higher speed, buffer data in memory making possible the so called RUR (read until right). But even a "classic" CD player features 512K FIFO memory; otherwise it will not be able to correct errors.

In conclusion, even the most expensive CD/DVD-ROM drive will not give you audiophile sound quality. Not to talk about the million hear-thin traces on a computer mother board, various controllers, HDDs, memory, interfaces, switching mode power supplies, jittery clocks, bunch of PLLs, etc., etc., etc. Each of those inevitably inducing....what?....jitter and noise.

Sadly, Kijanki is right; who cares about the best? Just keep bringing those high-rez MP3s. :-)

Just my 2 cents, as usual.

Best,
Alex Peychev
www.aplhifi.com