In message , Stewart
Pinkerton writes
On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 23:12:33 +0100, Pooh Bear
wrote:

Stewart Pinkerton wrote:

On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 16:52:56 +0100, tony sayer
wrote:

In article , Arny Krueger
writes

We did some investigations of high end CD/DVD players a few weeks ago, and
found that common high end practice seems to be to assemble the drive and
circuit boards from mid-fi machines into a nice looking case, maybe add a
gratuitous output buffer board, jack the price up by a factor of about 20,
and let the fun begin.


Now that...I could believe!.......

You'd better believe it! Deep inside the beautiful alloy casing of the
Mark Levinson 'Reference' transport at some $15,000, you'll find
exactly the same Philips industrial transport mech (and associated
electronics) as is used in the jukebox at your local pub.......

No surprise there then !

Wasn't there a better transport available ?

No, that *is* the best available transport (now that Sony have stopped
making the CDM-14). Costs all of $60 in OEM quantity, complete with
it's electronics pack.

At least my old Denon DCD-1700 has a transport that feels of 'battleship
quality'.

Actually no, that's just the loader, which has no function once the
disc starts to spin. You never see the actual transport, except in
some top loaders and a couple of Naims. And for the older nitpickers,
the Meridian 200 series.

In fact the entire player is built like that. Unlike many modern CD
players that you could pick up with your little finger, this is one that
actually inspires confidence due to its sheer weight !

Such confidence is however misplaced, as a really good transport must
have extremely low-mass moving parts - CDs do *not* spin at a constant
rate, so the rules are diametrically opposed to those for LP. Those
'high end' belt-drive transports are particularly hilarious!

But there'd be nothing to stop a CD drive spinning at a constant rate,
(provided it was high enough), and FIFO buffering the audio. There's
nothing to stop a maker reading the audio in high speed 'packet' bursts.
--
Chris Morriss