What make low-cost DVD players good performance ?

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People seem to not understand how CDs and jitter work.

The CD format is designed to take the CDM out of the equation. The DVD player in question will make a first-rate transport, as good as any other. It will not produce more or less jitter than any other transport. In fact, the last sentence is stupid. There's no more relation between the transport and jitter than there is between ice cream sales and shark attacks.

The D/A section is more complicated. There are so many factors starting with the PSU.
 
Originally posted by phn People seem to not understand how CDs and jitter work.

Yes. Please explain. :)

Originally posted by phn
The CD format is designed to take the CDM out of the equation. The DVD player in question will make a first-rate transport, as good as any other. It will not produce more or less jitter than any other transport.

So, does this imply no difference among expensive and low-cost transports ? If not the jitters, then what contribute to such audible differences ?

Originally posted by phn
In fact, the last sentence is stupid. There's no more relation between the transport and jitter than there is between ice cream sales and shark attacks.

Don't get it at all, phn. It should rather be my ignorance, IMHO.

Originally posted by phn
The D/A section is more complicated. There are so many factors starting with the PSU.

Yes, it's in the etc above. :D
 
phn said:
The DVD player in question will make a first-rate transport, as good as any other. It will not produce more or less jitter than any other transport.


In his article, Robert McNeice mentions that jitter may be reduced by mechanically damping the clock crystal. This seems a little contradictory to what you write about jitter and the transport.

I myself have never experienced any jitter improvements by damping the crystal, but are there any people out there who have measured the difference?
 
Premise: Ice cream sales go up in the summer.

Premise: The number of shark attacks goes up in the summer.

Conclusion: Ice cream causes shark attacks.

That's a classic example of a logical fallacy.

"Equipped with ESOTERIC's most advanced VRDS-NEO mechanism evolved from the critically acclaimed X-01. Rigidity and vibration-resistant ability is improved by the use of a half inch-thick solid shaved-aluminum mechanism base plate," it says on the Teac web site. And it goes on to tell about all the other marvelous things the P-01 transport does.

And this tweak guy dampens a crystal.

The Teac site doesn't say what the consequences are if you don't reduce vibration, but the idea is that you are to believe they are bad. The tweak guy is more upfront. Both are equally wrong. They are simply reversing the ice cream/shark attack reasoning. They tell you that they have banned ice cream on their beaches so now you can go in the water without having to worry about sharks. Aren't you happy you are on their beaches and not on one where the sharks are?

The information on a CD (and SACD and DVD-A) is interleaved. Thus, having a stable and steady motor is meaningless. A CD is nothing like vinyl. A CD is closer to a hard drive. A CD is read one rotation at the time. After each rotation the data is sent to the first-in, first-out devised, buffered and sent to the I2S bus or whatever.

Vibrations are clearly not good if they cause the CDM to skip. But no CDM vibrates, or shakes, that much. Meridian makes perhaps the lowest jitter CD player on the planet. Meridian uses CD ROM drives. You can believe they use special "audio-grade" CD ROM drives if you want. But you will be believing wrong.

The SPDIF, on the other hand, is a source for jitter. That should mean that the easiest way to avoid jitter is to not use separate transport and DAC.
 
Thanks for some explanation, phn.

Is the proof of no "transport effect" is the popularity of low-cost upscale dvd player ? Some of them offers the best video performance, like the OPPO DV-971 or the others.

No low-cost drive runs in real-time today ? All data are buffered first, like in the Merdian player ?

S/PDIF signalling is very well handled by decent commercial chips. However, we still hear difference when we use different transports to drive a decent DAC. What should be the critical points ?

So, what else are left ? The PSU, the components quality ?
 
phn said:
Premise: Ice cream sales go up in the summer.

Premise: The number of shark attacks goes up in the summer.

Conclusion: Ice cream causes shark attacks.

That's a classic example of a logical fallacy.

"Equipped with ESOTERIC's most advanced VRDS-NEO mechanism evolved from the critically acclaimed X-01. Rigidity and vibration-resistant ability is improved by the use of a half inch-thick solid shaved-aluminum mechanism base plate," it says on the Teac web site. And it goes on to tell about all the other marvelous things the P-01 transport does.

And this tweak guy dampens a crystal.

The Teac site doesn't say what the consequences are if you don't reduce vibration, but the idea is that you are to believe they are bad. The tweak guy is more upfront. Both are equally wrong. They are simply reversing the ice cream/shark attack reasoning. They tell you that they have banned ice cream on their beaches so now you can go in the water without having to worry about sharks. Aren't you happy you are on their beaches and not on one where the sharks are?


Dear god i loved that post :)

as for what causes jitter: cheap solutions ;)
 
bordins said:
S/PDIF signalling is very well handled by decent commercial chips. However, we still hear difference when we use different transports to drive a decent DAC. What should be the critical points ?

So, what else are left ? The PSU, the components quality ?

The DAC. Clock recovery should be good enough to not care about what's driving the SPDIF interface.

Which is a disaster, anyway. There's been vast amounts of ingenuity expended to work around the faults of SPDIF (no reference clock, weird impedance, no galvanic isolation) when a bit of forethought designing the standard would have saved everyone a lot of grief.

HDMI is by far the better standard. It includes a pixel clock, which can also be used as an audio clock, and the physical layer is well characterized. I'd like to see it become the audio interface standard of choice, but the obtrusive DRM gets in the way.
 
Originally posted by DSP_Geek
The DAC. Clock recovery should be good enough to not care about what's driving the SPDIF interface. There's been vast amounts of ingenuity expended to work around the faults of SPDIF (no reference clock, weird impedance, no galvanic isolation)

It seems people have confirmed no worry in getting perfect bits out of the disc at all. So, CD-ROM drive technology has come to the end. There should be no difference among drive manufacturers ? We just get OEM components (from China) : a drive, a laser module, a controller, with a good production facility. Then we will get the perfect bits. That's it ?

So, it is only the matter of the S/PDIF digial interface part that affects the outputstream, eventually the sonics ? So, how can we determine which low-cost dvd players are better on this aspect ?

People do worry about the issues of power supply. Do low-cost players handle this well enough to be able to make a "perfect" digital link ?

Originally posted by DSP_Geek
HDMI is by far the better standard. It includes a pixel clock, which can also be used as an audio clock,

How about Master/Slave clocking players ? Hi-end CD players tends to use this.

If HDMI can make the clocking at 100% accuracy, so any CD transport with the HDMI interface, DIY to $$$$ ones, should be the same ? :xeye:
 
bordins said:
It seems people have confirmed no worry in getting perfect bits out of the disc at all. So, CD-ROM drive technology has come to the end. There should be no difference among drive manufacturers ? We just get OEM components (from China) : a drive, a laser module, a controller, with a good production facility. Then we will get the perfect bits. That's it ?

Not quite. The analog section post-DAC has to Not Suck, as well as the DAC itself. That's where most products show their differences.

So, it is only the matter of the S/PDIF digial interface part that affects the outputstream, eventually the sonics ? So, how can we determine which low-cost dvd players are better on this aspect ?

People do worry about the issues of power supply. Do low-cost players handle this well enough to be able to make a "perfect" digital link ?

iCouldn't tell you. On the other hand, there are enough tweakers who claim good results to make this a subject of interest. On the gripping hand, _how much_ interest in power supplies makes for better sound? You need to figure that one outr for your own usae?

How about Master/Slave clocking players ? Hi-end CD players tends to use this.

If HDMI can make the clocking at 100% accuracy, so any CD transport with the HDMI interface, DIY to $$$$ ones, should be the same ? :xeye:

Hypothetically yes, But the Philips DRM really gets in the way of
getting the work done. Cheers!
 
There would not have been any $10,000 speaker cables if there hadn't been any $10,000 speakers.

I can fully understand that sombody who has a $5,000 DAC doesn't want to use a $100 Samsung multi-format player as transport. But you are mistaken if you think a CDM made of cast metal is automatically better than one made of plastic. That's marketing.
 
The quality of a cdrom unit reflects in how long it lasts (poor ones give up after a couple of months) and how much noise it makes, especially at data-grade speeds (52x). Reading the data without errors does not seem to be a problem for some years.

I'd say the performance comes from the analogue part of the player (psu and dac). Which makes me wonder if it's really worth to save (literally) a couple of bucks by using some cheap dac and i/v converter and cutting corners on the psu.

It's probably a target thing, cheap players compete in a market where each dollar counts and for expensive players you also pay the name, the case and the r&d costs (fewer units, bigger per-unit cost).
 
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