If you have a "kick booty" DAC, does the transport

in theory, a hard drive is just a high capacity disk fixed permanently in a transport, aside from differences in the data retrieval mechanism (laser) and buffer. almost all attributes of a state of the art transport should apply to a state of the art hard drive. imagine using an Esoteric/TEAC chasis and spinning mechanism plus the JVC/XRCD24 data transport process to create a hard drive...that would be one awesome sounding source!

I'm not sure all the attributes are the same - reading a HD reliably is basically a sure thing, while reading a CD in a transport in real-time apparently isn't a sure thing, or even close to it. What is the same, in a standard setup, is the transport from the reading device to the DAC, which is likely to be SPDIF in both cases, which creates an opportunity for error that should be equivalent in each approach. Still, the HD should be somewhere between somewhat and vastly more accurate than the CD / transport combo.

We need ethernet-enabled audio preamps and processors. Any error introduced by SPDIF would be eliminated, and we'd have the same technology from digital source to analog output as is used in bazillions of other applications where perfect transfer of data is considered a given.

i am not so sure that data retrieval from a hard drive is any more reliable than a cd transport when the quality of the disc, laser pickup, and spinning mechanism is the same. according to my very limited knowledge of electronics and computers, read and write errors occur often when spinning a hard drive, although we may not notice the effect of some (software hiccups, delays, crashes...). i believe there is no device that guarantees perfect data transfer available for consumers as of yet.

elements that i think are crucial for data retrieval are:
1. disc quality and condition
2. reading mechanism (laser)
3. speed and stability of spinning mechanism
4. power management
5. vibration control

please correct me if i am wrong.

Keep in mind that the actual electrical signal carrying the data from the transport to the DAC is an analog signal that is sampled at intervals by the DAC. Any corruption of this analog waveform will alter what the DAC "sees" on the link, especially the signal timing, the width of the pulses and the voltage during the sampling windows. Any variations in these can produce jitter (timing variations) in the recovered signal. This amounts to a transformation of amplitude variations in the analog signal to frequency changes in the digital signal. A lot of work has gone into minimizing these effects, but we're still not all the way there yet. For instance, the quality of the transport's power supply will have an effect on the accuracy of that analog signal carrying the encoded bitstream. Think of the output stage of the transport as the output stage of an ultra-high frequency preamp, and you'll start to get the picture. There's a lot more involved than the 1's and 0's.

I use a kick-ass DAC by anybody's measure, an Audio Note 4.1x Balanced Signature worth over $20K, and it makes the sonic defferences between transports and digital interconnects all the more more obvious. I recently upgraded my transport and interconnect from a a $5K combo to a $10K combo, and the improvement was striking.

Gliderguider
I could not of said it better!

Anthony
mauimods