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

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

Aplhifi, I think you're conflating several issues into one. A cheap CD drive is perfectly capable of delivering a perfect bit performance as far as data goes. If it couldn't, it would be useless in a computer. Corrupted data is no more useful to computer program than it is to a music system.

Of course, the drive may also be producing digital hash that gets picked up by the analog circuiting.

If the cheap and electrically noisy CD drive is side-by-side with the fancy audio electronics, it will likely influence the sound.

An, if a cheap drive has its output rebuffered, then it can't be blamed for a jittery signal - the buffer isn't doing its job.

If that cheap CD drive is in a computer far away from the stereo and is only being used to transfer data to another storage device, I become far more skeptical that there is an issue.

I rip my CDs to a music server (as noted earlier in this thread) and I've gone through several computers and optical drives over the years. I've yet to come across a situation where I can tell the difference between a file ripped on a Sony drive versus an Lite-On or other drive. Same thing with hard drives. I don't go "boy that Western Digital drive just doesn't have the same tone as my old Seagate...."

Of course, I keep my computer equipment away from my stereo in a different room.

Once again, in your next to last paragraph, you comingle two separate issues - jitter and noise. Jitter is a timing error that occurs when the data packet is converted to an analog sound. Jitter can be caused and addressed by several different issues.

EMI is a byproduct of the operation of digital circuits and other electrical devices. Good practice dictates that care be taken in circuit design to minimize that issue. It's tough to do that right in cheap products.

Finally, please do not put me in the "everything sounds the same" box. I've spent a lot of years picking out the equipment I like.

And I've also never said a word about MP3s in this discussion. The bulk of my collection is ripped to FLAC and I download very little music. Less than one-quarter of 1% of my collection is downloaded. Approximately 40% is material I've converted myself from LP and open reel to digital. (I'm in my 9th year of converting my analog collection to digital and working on another album as I type this.)

So to wrap this up, if you are going to have a CDP sitting on your system rack, it is important that it is a well designed piece of kit. If you are going to tell me that I can't get a bit perfect rip using the Sony drive in my DAW, then I guess we'll have to disagree.

I resent being classified as being "lazy" because I choose to do other things with my time, rather than spend it on an activity that I consider immature and unreliable.

Alex - I'm pretty sure that most of CDP don't spin faster and FIFO buffer is filled in real time just to take out jitter (while PLL keeps same average of both clocks). $19.95 Pioneer is not necessarily much worse then $6000 Esoteric since Pioneer is produced in milions. Also Esoteric drive alone doesn't cost $6000 (more like $600?).

Computer CD Drive doesn't have any particular speed during ripping process - it is program controlled and changes from 1x to about 20x on my Mac.

Server based system and mentioned Esoteric might sound different because of different electronics. Use top quality DAC in the system and to many it might sound better then Esoteric.

In my setup computer noise induced jitter doesn't make much difference since data is send to Airport Express not as a stream but as files/packets. AE decodes data and spits it out with its own clock achieving, according to Stereophile measurement 250ps word clock jitter. Dacs have usually some means of reducing jitter (like PLL). Benchmark DAC1 does even more but some people don't like upsampling or oversampling converters.