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+--- Thread: The negative positive (/Thread-The-negative-positive)
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RE: The negative positive - Hifi_swlon - 06-May-2016
(03-May-2016, 12:46)Confused Wrote: ....
So if I am right and streamers and music server have an advantage with the basic technology available, why is it CD players are still considered king with respect to sound quality?
Any ideas out there? I find this one a little baffling.
I often think about this.... especially if we're talking about CD player as digital transport.
Unless the scientists and engineers that designed CD technology and players (and evolved them over the years) are all dead and the knowledge lost, the first gen computer based playback should surely have been better than high-end CD players since we've got the benefit of 20 years worth of learning.
All I can think of is either there was a huge amount of custom hardware in CD players that wasn't easily replicated in computers, or engineers underestimated the negative effects of the computer, or we cared more about SQ during that era (not just as audiophiles but as consumers, music industry etc) so there was more emphasis put o it rather than the 'convenience' of modern playback and iPods etc. Or we're just imagining it - which seems 100% correct or 100% incorrect depending on who you ask, so it doesn't seem like we really understand ourselves that well even in 2016.....
RE: The negative positive - Confused - 06-May-2016
It's worth noting that very many manufacturers of streamers and music servers are also currently and historically CD player manufacturers. Think Arcam, Chord Electronics, dCS, Musical Fidelity, Bryston, and many more. Interestingly, the music server manufactures that appear to be getting the market share, such as Melco & Aurender, do not have any history of CD player design or manufacture.
RE: The negative positive - Antoine - 06-May-2016
IMO it's not really the general purpose computer itself that is the problem. It's a 'number cruncher' that does what it is designed to do: receive and send, display and manipulate data in the digital domain. Of course due to their nature of using high speed IC's, many high frequency clocks and low quality power computers are noisy. They emit levels of RF/EMI which pose little problems to it's own circuits but could potentially influence devices that are connected to it and/or the integrity of signals between those devices. They're also multitaskers, switching continously between hundreds of threads at once and connect many internal hardware components for different purposes over different busses that all add noise.
The problems with high-end computer audio using general purpose hard-/software lay primarily in the interface and conversion to the analog domain. It's the interfaces we've chosen to connect our DAC's and the, thus far, generally poor immunity to noise and degraded signal integrity of these DAC's. The 'optimizations' we're making in our PC's are actually mere band-aids, not addressing the real problems, but of course it's the only only thing we can do ourselves.
A CD player or CD transport is a device using nowadays very mature technology specifically designed for HQ audio including the interface(s) to the DAC. It itself contains only parts designed and tailor made for one function, reading the pits of a CD, error correction, conversion to a bitstream for output or conversion to an analog signal which the digital bitstream represented, all in real time. Power supplies inside are tailor made and possibly multiple separate ones and isolated ground planes are used e.g. for the digital and analog sections. Communication between digital parts inside are handled by I2S over short links. In case of a CD player only local clocks are used, clock signals in I2S are separate from the data, transported over short distances only.
Now compare this to a computer for example using USB, horror! I don't think I'd need to explain the differences. So many has already been written on this subject on the Internet. Again a recent discussion surfaced about the issues of USB. It's here and contains good posts from YashN and a quoted post by John Swenson. http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f8-general-forum/what-wrong-universal-serial-bus-industry-standard-cables-connectors-and-communications-protocols-between-computers-and-electronic-devices-connection-28500/
The old skool high-end world is clearly trying to catch up (look at a Bryston or PS Audio for example) so things are getting better, but we're/they're not there yet, in general that is. I think pro-audio is and always has been multiple steps ahead. Also it's taking the old skool companies too much time to adapt and keep adapting to the currently high pace so relatively new companies jumped in and fill the hole.