There's nothing we love more (okay, that's an exaggeration -- but barely) than
blatant overkill, and this here prototype from PS Audio fits that description to a T. Granted, we fully expect audiophiles to blindly stand up for this thing -- even though no one outside of the company has a clue just how incredible (or not) the innards actually are -- but here's the skinny. This not-yet-named CD transport reportedly transfers audio tracks from standard CDs onto internal memory for as long as the disc remains inside; apparently, this design "nullifies any jitter" and "other possible audio degradation." Theoretically sound as this logic may be, we can think of quite a few other ways to listen to music stored on flash memory (or similar) without spending $2,000. Who knows though, maybe that wood is incomprehensibly exotic.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
roger_huston @ Oct 19th 2007 12:37PM
PS Audio makes so very fine equipment indeed. I have seen a lot of different transports that spend a lot of money on trying to get the transport speed just perfect. I had wondered why none of the higher end transports didn't take this buffering approach. After all, my old walkman CD player had at least 8 sec. buffering.
All they really need to do is to buffer the CD audio stream enough to compensate from any speed variation of the transport mechanism. PS Audio does like to set bar pretty high.
However, $2k is not a lot to spend for a CD transport in the Audiophile world. Most decent ones start at $2500 and go way up from there.
-Roger
Raptor007 @ Oct 19th 2007 1:22PM
No... there's no reason to spend $2000 on a CD player. All you need is a reader with adequate buffering that can send a digital bitstream to your receiver. It doesn't get any better than that.
JeffDM @ Oct 20th 2007 4:08PM
The Walkman used buffering to cover up skipping through jostling, it usually gives enough time for the reader to recover and get back to where it was. My MD players had something like 30 seconds to a minute of skip protection to better hold up against running and such. A whole-disc buffer really isn't necessary to clean up jitter.
I'm not really seeing the point in this thing though. Might as well read it, FLAC encode it and be done with it.
Jeff @ Oct 20th 2007 7:24PM
I suppose you have to have something to try and justify spending more than $200-400 on a cd player. Wait, do people still buy cd players? Here is a tip. Spend $1000 on a computer that has hdmi out and a good sound card. Transfer your audio cds to your comp in wave format. If you are feeling spunky, buy a blu ray and HD drive for said comp. One or two cables from your comp to your audio system. Viola!