Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

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Not what I hear either

Posted by longtimequadowner (A) on April 5, 2006 at 14:08:53

In Reply to: not what I hear... posted by Chuck on April 5, 2006 at 10:11:43:

Not what I hear either. The advantage of PC based playback is that you can use EAC and/or other ripping tools (even itunes) and get a bit-perfect copy of the CD on your hard disk, permanently eliminating any jitter caused by transports reading in real time. EAC will take 2 hours to re-read the CD's sectors if it has to, to get a resultant 100% error free copy onto your hard disk. Once the CD is on your hard disk, it's subject to the same error detection/correction all other hard disk files are - yeilding a 0% error rate.

Now, you still have to get that 0% error rate datafile to your DAC and maintain the 0% data error rate during the trip - but given that there are USB based hard drives, digital scanners, digital printers, and a bazillion other USB based devices that send and receive data without error, it's hard to believe it can't happen with a USB based DAC - if it hasn't happened yet, it will soon. After all, if USB based external hard drives had even a 1% data error rate, they'd be unusable!!!

But hey, with transport prices as posted in a thread below like =>

CDT 3 retails for $7500.
CDT 2 II retails for $4650.
CDT 1 II (forthcoming) will retail for $2750

it seems like multi-kilobuck transports are good business. Sometimes people even post that these purely digital delivery mechanisms need "breaking in" to sound their best - the data delivered changes with breakin I guess. Wow. Seems like for $7500 a USB dac could be built to receive data from the hard drive with error correction built in, just as the bazillion USB based hard disk systems must do if they're to work at all.

Convenience has nothing to do with my choice of USB - I didn't even know if I could use a remote with it when I bought it for god sake! Thankfully remote media-mice work. But hey, I'm sure a bazillion deep technical arguments will be forthcoming as to why error free data transfer is impossible for USB audio devices while being commonplace for USB hard drives. Fortunately I'll understand none of them, and remain ignorantly blissful as I listen to what will probably be my last DAC ever, my USB based Burwen Bobcat. Ahh, sweet ignorant bliss...

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Kimber Kable

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