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Topic: "The Memory Player", new CDP/server/tube amp/WTF? (Read 3363 times) previous topic - next topic
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"The Memory Player", new CDP/server/tube amp/WTF?

http://www.novaphysicsgroup.com/

Can any make heads or tails of what this thing is really doing?  I gave up after page 2 and the tortured attempts to blame bad digital sound on Reed-Solomon error correction.

"The Memory Player", new CDP/server/tube amp/WTF?

Reply #1 –
Quote from: krabapple on
http://www.novaphysicsgroup.com/

Can any make heads or tails of what this thing is really doing?  I gave up after page 2 and the tortured attempts to blame bad digital sound on Reed-Solomon error correction.


I read some audiophile pseudoscience article once that tried to claim that digital audio played "from RAM" was better sounding than digital audio played "from Hard Drive" (I guess no one explained to him how the OS disk cache works ...)  Perhaps this is dogma for almost everyone in the cult, and the "Memory Player" name is capitalizing on that.

"The Memory Player", new CDP/server/tube amp/WTF?

Reply #2 –
The title of this thread suggests the next frontier: RAM implemented with tubes.  It has to sound better than than nasty solid state memory.  And it is so retro!

Bill

"The Memory Player", new CDP/server/tube amp/WTF?

Reply #3 –
on another foruma reader weighs in...

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in fact, RUR is NOT technically a "ripper", sorry, no more information until we get our copyright



Oooh! It's a secret, so it must be good!

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RUR is far more sophisticated than Upsampling or a relattively unsophisticated freeware CD ripper (in fact, RUR is NOT technically a "ripper", sorry, no more information until we get our copyright) "knows" if a bit was read and spends no time on captured bits. It does, however, reread a dropped bit not only 99X, but adjusts the laser to try to capture the bit. Some rereads will start reading early, some will attempt a later initiation, some rereads will overlap entire sections (blocks and sectors) to properly read the dropped bit, as most bit loss is due to the inability to precisely ascertain the initiation and termination points of a block of bits.

RUR is the lowest jitter form of CD reading known.



And this is different from OPEN SOURCE, i.e. FREE cdparanoia HOW?

Let's parse this a bit, shall we?

From what I can ascertain from that headache-inducing website and gobbledygook pseudo-scientific text, this miracle product is nothing more than a CD player (using an off the shelf CD or DVD-ROM drive, no less) with a tube output stage and a largish flash drive buffer memory. It rips (or doesn't rip, "copyright" pending) the disc and stores the files on a flash drive, then "jitter-free" sound emerges from the tube output stage, blahblahblah.....

From their description, the software (the "ripper that isn't a ripper") sounds identical in function to cdparanoia, which is an open source tool that has been around for ages. (I know, because I've used a commandline cdparanoia lib for the past 8 years, and -- yep -- you can tell it to reread any "bad" sector 99 times. Hmmm.)

I can already guess with 99.9% certitude that they are claiming that their "ripper" is in fact "not a ripper" because it merely temporarily dumps the ripped files to a flash buffer (the data on which will be overwritten when the next disc is inserted and ripped) as opposed to a henceforth permanently accessible AIFF or WAV file.

Furthermore, seeing that every CD player from day one features a small buffer of some sort or another (my old Discman held 20 seconds of "read ahead" buffer memory), good luck on getting a "copyright" -- note they didn't use the term "patent" -- on their variation of this basic *CD spec* implementation.

Of course the big audiophool scare word strewn throughout the text is JITTER. Guess what? Jitter is a negligible problem in general, and particularly NOT a problem when ripping with cdparanoia or EAC.