Jim Lesurf wrote:

I was asking about it from the point of view of the manufacturers, or at
least, as a viable technical solution, rather than from the point of
view of the consumer. Sorry, that wasn't very clear.

Clearly, the discerning hi-fi consumer will buy whatever seems to work
for them at the right price.

But, why do the manufacturers design and build CD players the way they
do?

I'd say it was because each will have their own ideas about the 'best' way
to get good results *and* to make a saelable product. Different engineers
will take different approaches just as different users will have different
priorities and preferences - cf Bob's comments about being able to compare
with a genuine original sound. What suits him may not suit someone else.
Doesn't make either view totally invalid, just personal.


From the point of view of creating a device from available componentry,
and then perhaps putting it on the market to compete against other
high-quality CD-playing devices, it's:

* very cheap to get all the data off a CD into RAM or another buffer *

Is it? On *every* occasion? I fear people may have become so used to Audio
CD, optical drives, etc, that they've forgotten how remarkable it is that
it works at all! :-)

It is pretty remarkable. And it is remarkable, but also galling, that my
£20 USB optical drive can reliably read anything I put in it, while the
hi-fi CD players in the house that I spent considerably more on will
reliably refuse to play certain discs (and not all the same ones in each
case).

Have you read the orginal Philips papers? They are pretty good.

I haven't, no. I confess that my ambitions for technical reading rarely
extend beyond software documentation these days.

Daniele