D.M. Procida wrote:

Clearly, the discerning hi-fi consumer will buy whatever seems to work
for them at the right price.

But, why do the manufacturers design and build CD players the way they
do?

[...]

The cheapest CDROM drive has to scrape every bit off a disc in order to
function as a reliable device for digital storage of software and data.
Presumably it can do just the same job for a music CD.

It might be cool to design a CD player with a solid, weighty chassis and
aerospace-grade bearings - but if the job of getting data off it can be
done as effectively by a transport + reader + data interface that costs
peanuts, why spend money doing that when it could be spent where it
would make more difference (a better DAC, a better control interface, a
better PSU)?

It's still not clear to me whether I'm missing something about how CD
audio actually works, or whether the CD player as we've known it for the
last 30+ years is an anachronism.

In a hotel lobby today, I was leafing through an hi-fi magazine I
happened to see. It reviewed a CD player, opening with a sentence to the
effect that "the CD player as we know it may soon be dead".

This CD player (a Meridian, and rather expensive) apparently uses a
cheap CD-ROM drive to get the data off the disk, and can use the drive's
extra speed to read ahead and buffer it (allowing it for example to have
multiple goes at reading problematic areas of the disk) in pretty much
the way I suggested would be possible.

I assume it's this one:
https://www.meridian-audio.com/en/products/cd-players/reference-808v6/.

So maybe I'm not missing anything... although I do note that this
solution to the problem of playing CDs doesn't actually make the
business cheaper.

Daniele

In article
,
D.M. Procida wrote:
This CD player (a Meridian, and rather expensive) apparently uses a
cheap CD-ROM drive to get the data off the disk, and can use the drive's
extra speed to read ahead and buffer it (allowing it for example to have
multiple goes at reading problematic areas of the disk) in pretty much
the way I suggested would be possible.

I've got a CD 'jukebox' here. Either plays CDs direct, or rips them to an
internal hard drive. And thrust me, you don't want a CD-Rom drive spinning
at speed in the same room as a CD you're listening to.

--
*El nino made me do it

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Once upon a time on usenet Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article
,
D.M. Procida wrote:
This CD player (a Meridian, and rather expensive) apparently uses a
cheap CD-ROM drive to get the data off the disk, and can use the
drive's extra speed to read ahead and buffer it (allowing it for
example to have multiple goes at reading problematic areas of the
disk) in pretty much the way I suggested would be possible.

I've got a CD 'jukebox' here. Either plays CDs direct, or rips them
to an internal hard drive. And thrust me, you don't want a CD-Rom
drive spinning at speed in the same room as a CD you're listening to.

Thrust you? No thanks. ;-)
--
Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy
little classification in the DSM*."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)
(*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article
,
D.M. Procida wrote:
This CD player (a Meridian, and rather expensive) apparently uses a
cheap CD-ROM drive to get the data off the disk, and can use the drive's
extra speed to read ahead and buffer it (allowing it for example to have
multiple goes at reading problematic areas of the disk) in pretty much
the way I suggested would be possible.

I've got a CD 'jukebox' here. Either plays CDs direct, or rips them to an
internal hard drive. And thrust me, you don't want a CD-Rom drive spinning
at speed in the same room as a CD you're listening to.

I know what a CD-ROM drive at full blast sounds like. However even the
cheapest ones now have quiet or silent modes; they don't all have to run
at top speed all the time.

The Meridian solution seems to do as I imagined, needing neither to
operate fully in real-time or to require storage of the complete CD.

Is your CD jukebox a homegrown affair?

Daniele

On Wed, 22 Nov 2017 09:41:35 +0000,
(D.M. Procida) wrote:

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article
,
D.M. Procida wrote:
This CD player (a Meridian, and rather expensive) apparently uses a
cheap CD-ROM drive to get the data off the disk, and can use the drive's
extra speed to read ahead and buffer it (allowing it for example to have
multiple goes at reading problematic areas of the disk) in pretty much
the way I suggested would be possible.

I've got a CD 'jukebox' here. Either plays CDs direct, or rips them to an
internal hard drive. And thrust me, you don't want a CD-Rom drive spinning
at speed in the same room as a CD you're listening to.

I know what a CD-ROM drive at full blast sounds like. However even the
cheapest ones now have quiet or silent modes; they don't all have to run
at top speed all the time.

The Meridian solution seems to do as I imagined, needing neither to
operate fully in real-time or to require storage of the complete CD.

Is your CD jukebox a homegrown affair?

Daniele

Transfer to SSD has to be the answer to all these issues.

d

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

In article ,
Don Pearce wrote:

Transfer to SSD has to be the answer to all these issues.

Once you've done the transfer. :-)

Alas, that then gives the metadata problems like not having the printed
leaflet handy, etc.

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

On Wed, 22 Nov 2017 10:33:21 +0000 (GMT), Jim Lesurf
wrote:

In article ,
Don Pearce wrote:

Transfer to SSD has to be the answer to all these issues.

Once you've done the transfer. :-)

Alas, that then gives the metadata problems like not having the printed
leaflet handy, etc.

Jim

As long as you are online, all that metadata is available with no
effort. Anyway, there's nothing to stop you keeping the sleeve notes -
and the original disc .

d

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

In article , Don Pearce
wrote:
Alas, that then gives the metadata problems like not having the printed
leaflet handy, etc.

Jim

As long as you are online, all that metadata is available with no
effort.

In general, I play files with a simple audio player without using a browser
or web. So you condition essentially returns 'false' for me.

I do now have a 'DAP', but of course when this will be used, it isn't
connected to the net or any wireless, etc. So again, would return 'false'
as above.

Anyway, there's nothing to stop you keeping the sleeve notes -
and the original disc .

Scanning it is the problem. Otherwise if you have to find the CD booklet,
so you may as well keep the CD with it and play that. :-)

In general I've not bothered to rip CDs. More useful from my POV to make
transfers from old LPs. The resulting file *is* more convenient to play -
particularly if I'm in the kitchen, say. And also lets me deal with
'clicks'.

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

On 22/11/2017 13:21, Don Pearce wrote:
Anyway, there's nothing to stop you keeping the sleeve notes -
and the original disc .

I've still got some gatefold LPs. They've been digitised, and the
recording cleaned up - but there's a lot to be said for a 24"x12" image...

Andy

Jim Lesurf said:
In article ,
Don Pearce wrote:

Transfer to SSD has to be the answer to all these issues.

Once you've done the transfer. :-)

The good news is, you only need to do it once.

Alas, that then gives the metadata problems like not having the printed
leaflet handy, etc.

Strictly speaking, that's not 'audio' ? ;-)

It's a point - but then again physical media have a metadata problem, too :
"you can't grep dead trees". Tagging Is Good.


As a clarinet player with no background in sound engineering, my concerns
are maybe a little off-centre here, but it's a very interesting thread, even
if I can't keep up - especially since I've been playing with 'making a
recording'. So this 'concert-hall' digression is intriguing for me. From the
POV of an instrumentalist with no-one to tell me what I should be doing, I
reckon I know what my instrument sounds like (if I'm playing it as nicely as
I can), better than any third party could, and _that_'s what I want people
to hear. It's a very idealised version of "reality" - I'm rather shocked at
how many little glitches slip through in my live playing (it's "the ill wind
that nobody blows good", like most wind instruments).

If anybody wishes to read my "off-centre" above as "eccentric", that'd be up
to them ...

--
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem

My email address is at http://qualmograph.org.uk/contact.html