pc based juke box

When will CDP companies put the HDD into the box? The HDD is waaay more capable than any opticle transport for feeding into the dac section. thus:

CD into tray
- copy CD content to HDD (no compression - hell, keep alternative codecs out of the equation)
NB: No streaming requirments required (ie no time limiting on read retries)

Pull audio direct from HDD to DAC.
- the AT commands required to do this are actually very similar to reading from a CD transport

I cant help thinking that the worst thing about PC audio is the PC itself. Windoze, formats, compression, DRM - all these things you dont need.

An extension of the CD player would be a technicaly better thing to do - but it would be harder to engineer and ultimatly I fear more prohibitively expensive due to being a lot less DIY.

 

lamboy,
ram would be even better - in fact meridian and chord already do this. however even they come in for criticism so as ever ymmv holds true.
cheers


julian

 

Yes, but with mere RAM you lose the storage aspect that makes this type of product the next logical extension.

Only those people that have used an audio library (ie iTunes, media player etc) understand the value in such a product - all your music on demand. gone are the halcyon days of having to physical place the CD in the drawer and press play.

Yikes - I remember the good old days of LPs when the sleeve also doubled up for something far more useful than reading the track listing

 

the thing is with putting the hdd in the audio player you introduce all sorts of things - like what happens when you run out of space, how do you back up, how do you access and manage it all, what about fan and hdd noise not to mention various voodoo stuff like mains noise, vibration from somethign spinning at 7200+ rpm etc.
with a pc server you can stick it in a room on the other side of the house, back up how you want, use whichever codec you want and effectively have an infinite amount of storage space as long as your wallet can take it.
hdd recorders have been around for a few years now - sideshowbob has a yamaha iirc and imerge, and various other manufacturers to them too but they've not caught on in a big way - mainly due to the fact that you can replicate their functionality plus a whole lot more for half the cost.
why would you want to trade the flexibility of a pc based audio system for something that does half as much for twice the cost?
cheers


julian

 

Cyrus do one but IMHO it is way over price

 

I totaly agree with your points about the flexibilty of having an audio server in another room, but if you want an audio library and dont want the hassle of PCs and networks - a single box is better. Regarding mounting the HDD in an environment required by high end electronics -> this is a challenge, but not an impossible one.

So, for the likes of us (geekville) the DIY PC+LAN route is best - for the industry I think a non-pc approach would be better. The current 'media' boxes are just nonstarter in my opinion (ie the moores media server etc). I know the Cyrus/Imerge/Yamaha etc players very well, but these arent targeting the audiophile sensibilities of a high end CD player - we need one that will.

 

It doesn't help that most of these Hifi HDD library boxes hold an amazing 80gb and it'll only cost £1500. Yeah right , and I need five of those. No wonder we chose the PC route.

 

Mind you in theory Memory sticks are now big enough to hold an entire album. No moving parts at all.

 

You are right Tom, 80Gb at £1500 - the numbers just dont add up.

Any CDPlayer at > £400 (my guesstimate) - the numbers dont add up here either!

Because you know that 80Gb is 50 quid you wonder where the money is - its not fair to justify a <insert audiophile brand CD player here> in pounds and compare to a product containing a HDD - then feel that the HDD product is overpriced.

Truth is they are both overpriced but thats the audiofool market.

IMO any digital front end costing >£1K should have a HDD storage facility - but then I am biased.

 

Take 10 CDs uncompressed and store on solid state memory - then tell me how much that amount of memory would cost.

 

I understand what you are saying in that a simple 'plug and play solution' is necessary however i don;t think the 2 are compatible. the strengths of digital audio are in it's flexibility - in order to allow the user to access that flexibility you have to have a screen, some way of adding more storage, yadda, yadda, yadda. as a replacement for cassette tape (and the vcr) hdd recorders are great but what if you want to record as wav then compress to whatever flavour of lossless you use for long term archival and have an mp3 version for use on your ipod oh and burn a cd for use in your car. the only thing with the flexibility to do all of that is a computer which unfortunately comes with all the attendant screens, mice, keyboards and other geekery that that entails.
cheers


julian

 

Give it time. Prices are coming down and capacity is going up. Another ten years and we'll have Julian's flexibility plus no moving parts. You read it here first

 

what you need is a chunk of 3d molecular memory with your entire collection on it encoded in a 64 bit floating point pseudo analogue format at a 512khz sample rate. that way you could take the matchbox sized chunk of memory wherever you went and just plug it into your hi-fi, car stereo or 25th generation i-spod and enjoy to pquality wherever you are.
cheers


julian

 

I brought a 1 Gb SD card for my TomTom Go the other day from Jessops, it cost £80, I think we're still a long way off Tom.

BTW it would hold about 1 1/2 CD's uncompressed.

 

Almost right, for iirc in William Gibson's book Virtual Light people were sticking a collection of programs and data called "Softs" directly into their head before before expoloring the web via their computer.

Tomorrow happened yesterday.

Good thread btw.

 

If we are still using CDs (a la redbook) in 10 years time, then I totally agree.

 

hmm i'd want some pretty strong firewalls, virus protection and adware supressors before i stuck anythign into my head. just imagine the mcdonalds 'i'm loving it' theme tune 27/7 with happy shiny people bouning around having 'lives' in the corner of your vision all day.... no thanks. have a read of some of neal stephensons stuff (diamond age and snowcrash in particular) for some dystopian ideas on the human machine interface.
cheers


julian

 

Perpendicular recording is almost here, so the capacities will increase still further (continuing to leave solid state behind).

With this capacity also comes performance way ahead of what is required - what does this mean (i hear you say).

OK, in an audio system you have host buffers and drive buffers required for speed matching (and a bunch of other things), so with the host buffers the system reads from solid state memory (like the meridians and Chords).

Sooo actually a HDD based system uses both HDD and solid state, but.....

When you have high performance HDD its only actually required to be used when a) writing to the drive (commiting a CD to storage) or b) Reading the data for sending to the DAC.

When reading music data the stream size (amount of data per second) is fairly small (actually does anyone know what this is exactly?) - so the drive commits a lot of data very quickly into the host read buffers, but....

the DAC only pulls at a set speed....giving you a lot of time where the HDD isnt required (you can even spin it down solving any issues of vibes and heat).

Theoreticaly a well designed system with an adequate HDD capacity and a good buffer size would be a really good system - and because of the new external SATA specs you could very easily buy external drives to increase the capacity.

Just make sure they are Seagate

 

[thread hijack] hey, i'm thinking of getting a tomtom go, cos i get lost almost everytime i drive somewhere, what do u think of it ? [/thread hijack]

 

Check out the chat forum, I'll move it there