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FW: Bizzare cdrom drive for a wearable

I have to speak-up here...

For the price, CD's blow away the quality of LP's and for most home 
audio systems they are more then adequate; very few people have their 
speakers located correctly (including me) to be able to tell the 
difference between a $100 CD player and a $2000 record player.  That 
said, the audiophiles do have a point, it has nothing to do with the 
frequency response and everything to with the phase distortion.  Under 
ideal conditions, and even with only 2 speakers, a well recorded LP 
will produce a full landscape of sound whereas a CD can only produce 
sound from a few discrete locations that jump around due to aliasing.

As for storage for a portable, HD's are the way to go.  The prices are 
dropping, the power consumption is dropping, the sizes are increasing. 
 Keep in mind that a CD only holds 600M whereas HD's are commonly in 
the 6G range (10 CD's).  You could even keep common static files in 
Flash or PROM; I've seen 1G PROM cards, a little bulky but they only 
require power when accessed and they are fast.

----------
From:  Rehmi Post[SMTP:]
Sent:  Wednesday, June 17, 1998 7:03 PM
To:  ; Jason Dufair
Subject:  Re: Bizzare cdrom drive for a wearable

All modern media compression schemes are "lossy" -- it's just that the 
coding
is chosen to minimize errors with respect to a model of the 
listener's
perception.

Audiophiles are notorious for a sort of subjective empiricism that 
lags
technology by about 10 years.  A decade ago, many still insisted that 
CDs
couldn't capture all the nuances that vinyl could.  A popular opinion 
to
espouse when most audio manufacturers were still working at isolating 
the
analog backend from the noise in the digital frontend, but laughable 
today.

Oh, one more thing.  You're really losing an incredible amount of 
phase
information with a 44.1 ksps CD, anyway.  Human audio perception is 
generally
accepted to be sensitive to 10 microsecond shifts in relative phase 
between the
left and right ear, so you really want 100 ksps per channel.

Finally, this technology is entirely appropriate for data storage, 
because
that's what an MD player records and plays back.  If memory serves, 
MDs are
usually formatted as 2.5", 230 megabyte magneto-optical media.

    -rehmi

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Dufair <>
To:  <>
Date: Wednesday, June 17, 1998 4:09 PM
Subject: Re: Bizzare cdrom drive for a wearable

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

MD (minidisk) is not an advancement but a retreat in audio
technology.  It uses lossy compression that drops some of the low
order bits of the sample.  I have not heard one, but I am aware that
some people, esp. audiophiles can hear the loss of quality.  This
property would seem to make it inappropriate for data storage a la 
cd-
rom.

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