Transportless Player

[EUVL]

It has been on my mind for a while and my quick search did not come up with anything similar.

My question is :

Since everyone knows that any CD / DVD transport, however high end, always have reading errors, why hasn't anyone here come up with a transportless player by just putting the 'music' on a memory stick, and then just plug and play -- sort of like MP3, all solid state, but using red box CD or SACD or DVDA formats.

Surely, memory size can no longer be an issue these days ?

I do not mean using a PC as music player (have already gone through that thread), but a dedicated player which just load the digital information from a solid state memory instead of a spinning transport. Or is it too boring without moving parts ?

Looking forward to some enlightening advices,


Patrick

[Hybrid fourdoor]

They do, there called streaming media centers. You hook up to the network, and stream MP3's, WAV's, whatever from a computer somewhere on the network. Then theres all in ones like the Escient Fireball (sp?) that has a built in hardrive. But that one is very expensive.

Most of these all have Digital outputs.

The problem is that most poeple on audio sites will find some mundane fault in the process. Of course the MP3 thing will get ripped to shreds, even though its pretty well tested that its extrememly hard to tell a 320kbps from a WAV when using good software.

Then you get to WAV's and poeple will say "oh well I have a SACD or DVD-A player, and you can't record those onto a computer in full glory".

Then of course the physical construction comes into question, because somehow some poeple would be able to hear the difference in a digital 1 or 0 when its coming though a player that has plastic feet, versus one that has hand rubbed wood feet. And a box that weighs 2 pounds can't possibly sound good right??

And the number one comment on DiyAudio....those things are so damn complex nowadays that we can't build them ourselves.......and thats the truth!


My opinion is that these network players are awsome, and extremely convient. Nothing like having your whole album collection on hand and hitting the "random" button. I'm in the process of archiving my CD's to my computer (CDex using Lame preset insane), and I love the convience.


And everything still has some type of element of error. Hardrives work just like CD's, and memory can still have stuck gates or whatever they are made up of. Luckily there is a good deal of error correction in digital, as opposed to analogue. Plus CD is one of the few that suffers from constant physical damage (scratches).


Also if you can find a player that has a built in hardrive that uses IDE, you can get an adaptor that allows you to plug a Compact Flash card straight to an IDE bus. So it would be very responsive and be very quite. However finacially your limited to about 4GB of compact flash (not the 1" hardrives that are CF form factor). Although I did just read someone (Toshiba maybe) came out with a 8GB CF card at a cool price of $1000




Not attacking anyone here specifically, just repeating most of the comments I see on the internet

[EUVL]

Well, not quite what I meant.

Suppose you already have a large collection of digital music, and are archiving it in your computer (like you said). You can of course read it multiple time and use some error correction software to minimise your reading error. Or maybe one day we can get them direct downloaded in wav or whatvever format. So the starting point is perfect audio data stored somewhere, say in a PC.

So now you could, when you want, load these digital music onto say a 1GB USM memory stick (these days costs around $100-) and then plug the latter in turn into your dedicated player, with whatever high end clock and what not, as you like, to read that information and play it out, just like a normal CD or SACD or DVDA player.

Wouldn't that make sense ? I am assuming of course that loading into solid state memory is less susceptical to error, which may or maynot be true. But at least you can load it again and again until it is error free.


Patrick

[454Casull]

KISS.

Hybrid, you may want to consider losslessly compressing your music. The FLAC codec seems to be quite popular (although lossless compression achieves somewhere around 50% compression).

Also, how do you read the music onto the solid-state memory without a transport of some kind? You could download the music, but it would most likely be ripped from a disc.

[EUVL]

I'm terribly sorry, but my only interest is a way to eliminate the need for mechanical movement in data retrieval. Whether the data should come in what format, compressed or not, is irrelevant to this discussion.

Patrick

[EUVL]

No one else interested ?

Can't be such a bad idea to get rid of moving parts ?
(Me being a mechanical engineering is the irony !!)


Patrick

[digiaudio]

http://www.riksmusic.com/marantz/pic...pmd570-lrg.htm

this is a compact flash reader. perhaps you are wanting a DIY version of this?

[Bernhard]

What about harddisk recorders ?
The stuff, musicians use for homerecording ?

Also I once opened a (dead) Yamaha audio recorder and what I saw was an IDE CD burner

[EUVL]

> What about harddisk recorders ?

The question is, which recording and reading method (CD, DVD, harddisk, solid state memory, ......) is LEAST susceptible to reading error IN REAL TIME (when reading offline, one can do it as many time as one wishes and try to average out random reading error).

I do not have an answer for that. If I do, the discussion is perhaps more focused.


Patrick

[Bricolo]

Before you want to criticize the Audio CD format, because it may produce reading errors and such things, you must carefully study those errors and theyr source.

Then, you'll be able to know if another format also has those errors, of if it has other ones.


I have no answear to that, but it seems obvious to me that nothing is perfect