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Re: Theory vs. Practice

*** In my experience, it really is possible to improve a stock CDP by orders of magnitude and achieve fanastic results ***

Well, this is a subjective statement.

Put it this way, after all these mods, the player did NOT improve in terms of THD, IMD, channel separation, ... etc. by "orders of magnitude", did it? Did distortion reduce from 0.001% to 0.0001%? Did the noise floor reduce by 10dB?

If you can't show these sorts of improvements then I would argue the point on "orders of magnitude".

Here's something to ponder on. Based on my measurements and some theoretical calculations: If the source signal rapidly changes in amplitude and frequency), then even relatively small errors in the time domain (caused by jitter) or amplitude (caused by filtering/upsampling etc.) can cause reconstruction errors for frequencies above 15kHz (for 44.1kHz sampling rate) so LARGE they exceed full scale at 20-22kHz (and is this is in the digital domain prior to Nyquist filtering)!!!.

Let me say it another way: the waveform (which in my case is a test signal consisting of a pair of sine waves modulated in both frequency and amplitude) that is being reconstructed is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from that implied by the captured recording. No wonder many people complain that CD high frequencies sound funny.

Under these conditions it DOES NOT MATTER how much improvement you make in the power supply or analog stage etc. because THE WRONG SIGNAL is being reproduced.

That's what I mean by focusing on the wrong area.

However, if you can actually reduce jitter by orders of magnitude (ie. from nanoseconds to picoseconds), or if you can somehow reduce amplitude errors (by avoiding quantization error where possible), you CAN improve performance by orders of magnitude (literally!) because the reconstructed signal is now a LOT closer to theory.

To do this does not require expensive Black Caps, or Vishays, or TENT clocks, battery power, or tube buffers ... Yes they help, but AFTER you've attacked the root cause. And this requires a different approach to CD playback than that used in most existing players, which means modifying an existing player is out of the question (although I am interested in what some people like Thorsten are doing).

What I'm saying is not rocket science - it just requires lateral thinking. And you have to stop thinking of a player as an analog device (with a complicated digital front end). Instead, think of it as a problem in digital signal transmission (from the media to the DAC), and the analog stage at the back end is almost inconsequential (let's face it, on most modern DACs it really should be nothing more than I-V and low pass filtering).

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