25 Years Of The CD

Hello Ampnutji,

Very interesting information, just imagine how many vinyl LP's were made

There is a thread at Audiogon about 25th anni of CD and how long will it last.
Anil

ani schrieb:

There is a thread at Audiogon about 25th anni of CD and how long will it last. Anil

I am a digital age person, however, the days of CD are numbered. HDD based music severs will take over in the next 5 years.

http://www.positive-...ics_memoryplayer.htm

http://www.novaphysicsgroup.com/

Please do try and take a look.

This is serious shit !!

Read abt the Nova Physics Memory Player with interest.
Would love to hear it for myself!
Hopefully, prices wld become more affordable in time -maybe by also creaing a model that can take advantage of the RAM/HDD etc already available in home computers...
How abt streaming audio on demand similarly "corrected/processed"
direct to your system, sometome in the future?
Say, at a subscription rate of Rs 2000 per annum?

Hi Bhagwan69

Thanks for the 2 informative links.

I agree with you that Memory / HDD based music is the future and I have been listning to a few of them over the past 1 year.

Being an iPod fan, for mid fi and convenience has only spurred my interest in this... hoping that the medium will soon ( ? ) attain Hi End performance.

I would like to share a few thoughts on the topic...

I MAJOR impedement to CDs being obsoleted will be the recording companies. CDs provide a physical medium to retail, and avoid piracy, atleast to some extent.

A STEREOPHILE review of the Logitech Music server, rated it at True High End, a few months ago. It was priced at US $ 2,000 which is less than Any High End CD Player listed by the same publiucation. ( The cheap Oppo Players are ONLY rated well as TRNSPORTS and NOT as CD Players ! )

I have heard and used the SONUS Wi Fi Music servers and xclients. IMHO, they are a shade Worse than an iPod.... though as convenience and life style products, trhey are SUPERB.

I have had the oppourtunity to listen at lenght to the Zero-One HDD player and DAC, that is sold in India by Nova Electronics. It6 is VERY good, very smooth, and I guess optimised for Classical music...

In some aspects the HDD based player with its own DAC ( Has various upsampling options ) was smoother and easier sounding than a Wadia CDP.

The HDD player + DAC was ... I THINK ... priced at US $ 2,500 or US $ 3,000 retails ( would be approx x 40 for the Rupee price ). Check with Nova Audio, though. I could be wrong.

That HDD player came with a 250 GB HDD. On that note, I wonder why the RUR HDD player is priced at 2x for the 250 GB ( or whatever ) version, compared to the 80GB version... since all other features and specs are identical ... :?

I also do not quite understand how much of an improvement it makes to cache the data into a 1 GB Flash memory, FROM a HDD, rather than directly from the HDD. Flash Memories too generate 'bad sectors' and errors... I know, I have thrown away several Flash drives for my computer data applications, over the past 2 years.

Personally I speculate that the DAC makes a FAR Larger audible difference to the sound, than tweaks on the HDD player, like a Flash Buffer for streaming.

Each HDD player comes with its own DAC... which provide dirrerent subjective sounds. Though ofcourse, most serious HDD players also provide digital outputs.

Kamalji said :

maybe by also creaing a model that can take advantage of the RAM/HDD etc already available in home computers..

It may be of interest to you, that a FREE DOWNLOAD - Exact Audio CD (EAC) :

http://www.exactaudiocd.de

will do what RUR does, while copying CDs to your HDD.

Though a freeware, EAC is the reference software for Error Free Reading of CDs..

I have been using it for the past 2 years or so.

Would be nice to hear of other's experiences with HDD players.

This was a really really good read..Thank you for sharing

bhagwan69 schrieb:

I am a digital age person, however, the days of CD are numbered. HDD based music severs will take over in the next 5 years. http://www.positive-...ics_memoryplayer.htm

I have often wondered about the Reed-Solomon Error Correction Code (RS-ECC) and only now have got a picture of that the transport actually does. have been seeing a remarkable change in sound after I upgraded my transport to a Classe CDT1.

am just quoting from teh above article which i found to be the gist of the whole write-up

The RS-ECC is what Sony brought to the table when Philips was readying to take the CD to market. The RS-ECC helped significantly at that time to overcome the myriad of stumbling blocks that raised their ugly head during practical playback. The short list includes dropped bits, jitter, Gaussian Noise, logic inversions, as well as all the possible permutations of interactions of these individual problems. In short, RS-ECC turned the CD into a commercially viable product. But just like the "perfect sound forever" business, RS-ECC, according to Mark, falls short of perfection. And, he goes on, because RS-ECC is not perfect, it is at the top of the list of reasons why the quality of CD sound is constantly being called into question. The basic problem, he claims, is that in many cases RS-ECC creates uncorrelated bits of data when it finds missing bits that cannot be derived from the existing or redundant data. Mark insists that it is this uncorrelated data that come across as a layer of irritating sounds during normal CD playback. We are talking here about a subtle, almost subliminal, synthetic veiling of the sound. While not something overt, it is a tenuous, drone-like contamination always prevailing in the background. It gets to some people more than others, but it is always there. Over the years many audiophile friends and I have been wondering just why it is that different transports sound different, and that even changing the support of the transport changes the sound. Furthermore, why is it that CD anti-static procedures make a difference, that sprays and polishes applied to the CD surface made a difference, that high intensity light-exposure made a difference, that demagnetization devices made a difference? All these changes are usually for the better. Why is it that a CD-R copy can sound better than the original? It does make me wonder. If the R-S ECC is supposed to be so powerful, why is it that all these "tweaks" often make a difference?

bhagwan69 schrieb:

This is serious shit !! :KR

You Betcha ! Thanks again for sharing

HI Bhagwan,
Very interesting info and written in plain layman friendly language too

Hope the memory based playback will become a standard and hi resolution donwload a reality. The piracy profitability of music companies will be an issue.

Regards
Anil

We have made one.
It is there @ one of our forum members place.
It has already improved on a 14 K US $ [list price] CD Player. We are still working on different modifications.

If any forum member wants to 'hear' the difference for himself, please do get in touch with 'satyam' on our forum and drop by for a listen. It is most interesting. Trust me for now & then your ears !!! It is crazy !!! I too may dump by 3 cd plays and go in for this !!!

Hi AmpNutJi, a nice, lengthy& informative post as usual!
From what I understand of the article,conventional CDP's can't function viably w/o the RSS ECC.
However, while the RS ECC enables the viability of the CDP, it also creates enough pungas which prevent even the most advanced CDP's from equalling the sonic abilities of analogue sources.
To overcome this drawback, Nova has hit upon this technique of high speed, iterative passes to cumulatively extract all the data contained in the CD & storing it in a fast medium like a flash memory,thus doing away with the necessity of the RS ECC-which while crucial for extraction of data in a single pass playback system like conventional CDP's, is rendered redundant for error free data extraction by the method devised by Nova Physics.
They prefer flash memory over HDD's primarily because FM's are relatively jitter free as compared to HDDs'.
The downside that I see to there methodology is that when you exract & build up a library on an HDD,playing back music stored on the HDD, even thru a FM, will reintroduce at least the jitter problem.
Because this iterative method of data extraction hit upon by Nova takes 12 minutes even while spinning the CD at high speed, I doubt that Exact audio copy, while being better than normal methods of reading CDs', can approach the capabilities of the Nova system-hence the thought of also creating an add on to a home PC in an effort to reduce costs for the benefit of poorer, third world audiophiles.

( The cheap Oppo Players are ONLY rated well as TRNSPORTS and NOT as CD Players ! )

I've had the Oppo981HD for over a month now( My brother picked up a piece for himself as well as for me)
My brother uses it primarily to play DVDs thru his Samsung bordeaux LCD TV (1080i native resolution)-really amazing results-you have to see to believe-only a Blu Ray could better it.
I have been using it primarily to play music, replacing my aging panasonic.
AmpNutJi, I am hearing music as never before,I am hearing details which I did'nt know existed, the clarity is such that every word of the lyrics comes across, the sound is beautifully controlled & balanced.This level was reached after I replaced the stock Interconnects & existing speaker cables with ones' from Viren.
To sum it up, I am really enjoying my music!
I would never be so foolish as to make claims that the Oppo equals the sonic qualities of much more expensive, standalone CDPs which contain far more sophisticated DACs( so far as the abilities of its transport is concerned Wes Philips stated in his May 07 review of the lowest Oppo model, DV970,that if you pair its transport with a good DAC,".... now you're talking world class".
Thats what I plan to do later, get a nice DAC to go with it.
BUT in the meantime,this is an excellent source component for the price you pay and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to people who want a high quality source but are not able to afford an expensive CDP right away...plus , its a world class DVD player as it is!
Sorry for the long, rambling post!!!

another interesting discussion on AA on similiar lines

http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/vt.mpl?f=digital&m=131391