oxric wrote:

I have been looking forward to build my own ….. sometime towards the summer of next year.

Romy the Cat wrote:

The introduction of new things in computer world is so rapid that the six months that you have ahead of you might make your today’s exploration irrelevant. ... So, I would advise to look into the market of offerable when you will be ready to proceed with the project. The Cat

oxric wrote:

However, a new UK venture seems to have taken on board most of the criteria that I had set myself and come up with an off-the-shelf solution. Please see below: http://www.itemaudio.co.uk/windows_audio_transport.html I am however daunted by the size of those two cases, and the price is on the high side for what's on offer. I am sure the size of that behemoth is not justified, even though it makes passive cooling easier to achieve, or I would have seriously considered getting one of these. In any case, this is the way to go and eventually someone, maybe Item Audio themselves with their next generation "Transport", will bring something like this but in a considerably smaller form factor to market. Best regards Rakesh

Romy the Cat wrote:

I do not know what you are trying to do, why do you need the Lynx card, why is need to be modified and what does it mean “powered individually”, the people looks like sell power supply and they push the notion of individual power but no one said that it is good for sound.  My biggest misunderstanding of this entire thread is that they and you talk about transport but I do not see any efforts on the Item Audio side to good make PC based transport. To talk about hard drive, sound card, and the rest DAW context does not require a lot of brain – buy a regular PC, put in good sound card and you have a well performing machine. The linear PS is controversial in my view and no one to the best of my knowledge makes PC-based universal transports. The PC-based universal transports is what I care and I do not care about their power supplies, even if they are beneficial.

item wrote:

Part of the reason we call our computers 'transports' is to encourage people to think of the number-crunching part of an audio system in the same already familiar terms as a CD player - because all the same things matter: CD transports vary according to the quality of their clocking, board design, EM and RF rejection, (crucially) power supplies and distribution, and vibration control. Computer transports are no different: it's helpful to forget about where the music is stored, and consider very carefully the local playback environment.

Item, it is incorrect, the definition of 'transports' is something the read disks. My vacuum cleaner use the same underlying principles as your devise and “all the same things matter”: electricity, board design, current-carrying conductors, magnetic fields, Faraday effect. So, why don’t you call your devise a “vacuum cleaner”? In reality what you do looks has absolutely nothing to do with media transport. You do PC-based file players, so call it this way. Uses DAW - digital audio workstation term used for such machines in the pro audio industry. I do not object what you do but I very much object how you call your DAW machines as 'transports' – it is misleading as I do look for PC-based transports and what you do has as much use in my field as a vacuum cleaner in a field cancer treatment.

item wrote:

It's then possible to have a computer that sounds better than a high quality CD transport, even with Red Book material (see December 2011 HiFi World).

I do not read the HiFi World. The people who work they are as much idiots as single-minded everywhere else. Do you make a claim that your devise is able to read CD disk and output it to a DAC with resulting Sound better then a CD transport of my choice? If you insist that it is the fact then what other formats your transport is able to read?

Item,

I agree that a digital transport only processes data (actually not processes but read would be more accurate definition but I do understand that reading implies a lot of processing) and delivers it to a converter but in real world in order files to be there in some kind of format they need to be inserted in there.  The migration of files from file provider to consumers is still mostly happen by optical disk of multiple formats. Industry most of the time does not allow distribution of uncompressed raw filers and most of the downloads out there (unfortunately) are rips from optical disks. Sure there are some exceptions but they are very rare and have own issuers. So, in one way of another there is in most of the cases a process of disk reading – would it be in end user house or at EMI download facility where the disc is read by optical transport and uploaded to their server for further distribution.

That is why what I refer to “transport” I refer to the very primary duty – to read an optical disk and the ability to create more advanced sound out of it. As a persons who am familiar with the best optical disk readers out there (something called “transport”) I am very interested to find a PC based transport that would deliver sound competitive to best conventional transports. So far I was not able to find any, despite to many assurances. I did not see your things and I do not know what you do, this is why I was asking.

If the HFi World made the claim that your DAT1 sounds better playing the same track than their reference Cyrus CD Transport then it mean one of the following:

1)    That you bought more advertising in HFi World then Cyrus
2)    The HFi World editor when he matched the performance of your “transports” to an idiocy of a specific reviewer did a good job.

It shell be the their choice: your DAT1 in fact might be better then this Cyrus CD Transport but what file your DAT1 played? It did not play optical driver in real time – you have no such an option - it played a file. So, how the file was ripped from disk and peace to HH for your DAT1 devise. What transport or CD-rom read the file, what software it was?

For me the issue you take with the appellation of the Item Audio Transport is one purely of semantics. For the record,  you say it is not a ‘cd transport.’ Well, the company does not make such a claim. They describe it as a digital transport, use inverted commas and then go on to explain exactly what it does and the options available. Onkyo call their ND-S1 docking station and Linn some of their players a digital transport. As anyone with a modicum of intelligence, I would just look up these companies’ website if I have any lingering doubt as to what exactly they do. This semantic discussion serves no purpose especially given that the owner of this forum has so little claim to being an authority in matters of linguistics.

Is there such a thing as a widely accepted definition of a digital transport? I do not think there is one. That’s why some companies use the word 'transport' when the unit fulfils the sort of function that a cd transport commonly fills, a cd transport maybe being safely defined as follows:

A CD Transport is a device which spins a CD, scans the optical data on the disc using a laser, decodes the data into one or more streams of numbers and codes this data into one or more digital audio formats. A Transport cannot drive a conventional power amplifier directly as it requires an external Digital-to-Analogue Converter (DAC) to do this.

You can see that there are two parts to this generally accepted definition, one positive and the other negative. Firstly, it spins dics and reads the noughts and 1s. This data is then coded in one or more digital formats. By analogy, an Item Audio equipped with an optional blu-ray drive would serve precisely this function. It would spin a disc, extract the data and code it so that it is available for the next stage in the chain. Regarding the negative part of the definition above, it suggests that a cd transport is one characterised by the lack of an onboard DAC. So this as well appears to be a characteristic of the Item Audio unit. I do not find any of their description misleading and would not take issue with their calling it a ‘transport’, although I would have preferred more time devoted to explaining how they address issues regarding the extraction of the digital data and coding it.

It appears to me that you are looking for a transport whose only function is to extract the data from multiple media discs, which would make it a universal transport. I think it is highly unlikely for there to be such a device uniquely devoted to reading discs available anywhere commercially. I am sure this function is fraught with difficulties but I do not see anyone investing resources in developing such a device from the grounds up in terms of both hardware and software.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Item, If the HFi World made the claim that your DAT1 sounds better playing the same track than their reference Cyrus CD Transport then it mean one of the following: 1)    That you bought more advertising in HFi World then Cyrus 2)    The HFi World editor when he matched the performance of your “transports” to an idiocy of a specific reviewer did a good job. It shell be the their choice: your DAT1 in fact might be better then this Cyrus CD Transport but what file your DAT1 played? It did not play optical driver in real time – you have no such an option - it played a file. So, how the file was ripped from disk and peace to HH for your DAT1 devise. What transport or CD-rom read the file, what software it was? Rgs, Romy the Cat

Romy the Cat wrote:

That is why what I refer to “transport” I refer to the very primary duty – to read an optical disk and the ability to create more advanced sound out of it. As a persons who am familiar with the best optical disk readers out there (something called “transport”) I am very interested to find a PC based transport that would deliver sound competitive to best conventional transports. So far I was not able to find any, despite to many assurances. I did not see your things and I do not know what you do, this is why I was asking. If the HFi World made the claim that your DAT1 sounds better playing the same track than their reference Cyrus CD Transport then it mean one of the following: 1)    That you bought more advertising in HFi World then Cyrus 2)    The HFi World editor when he matched the performance of your “transports” to an idiocy of a specific reviewer did a good job. It shell be the their choice: your DAT1 in fact might be better then this Cyrus CD Transport but what file your DAT1 played? It did not play optical driver in real time – you have no such an option - it played a file. So, how the file was ripped from disk and peace to HH for your DAT1 devise. What transport or CD-rom read the file, what software it was? Rgs, Romy the Cat

oxric wrote:

By analogy, an Item Audio equipped with an optional blu-ray drive would serve precisely this function. It would spin a disc, extract the data and code it so that it is available for the next stage in the chain.

Yes it might but it needs to do it in real time. I do not think at this point Item Audio “transport” performs this rudimental transport duty.

oxric wrote:

Reviewer bashing Romy? Without knowing who it is and what was said?

item wrote:

If you want to spin a CD during playback, for nostalgic reasons, then a CD player is fine. The only reason to do so, however, is to extract stored data. Computers have better ways to do this that don't invoke all the mechanical headaches of an optical drive. Keeping the whole process in solid state is very fast, very clean and sounds very good.

It has absolutely nothing to do with nostalgic reasons. Again, if you do not get it: music today is being released in solid state format. None of the major labels do it yet and it is questionably if it even happens. There are objective reasons why it might be problematic if is ever do happen. Yes, keeping the whole process in solid state is very good but with very minor exception that do not even make a dent in market share it does not exists.

item wrote:

If you've auditioned widely, you'll know that - despite losing the optical mech - most computers don't sound great compared with a CD transport. It's taken us a long time to surpass that benchmark, and be prepared to offer something for review.

I do not mind you to use my site to make lightweight marketing statements. Computers long surpassed any CD transports when they play raw uncompressed files. Computers, in my view, are nowhere when they read the CDs and store data to drives. That is why I was asking: how the files that your computer read was made? Did it come from CD? How this CD was read, which transport did it?

item wrote:

The editor took something of a risk in passing this judgment because they are quite involved with Cyrus, whereas we have never taken any advertising in their publication. He simply called it as he heard it. We offer free trials for anyone to do the same.

Who care what your editor said. He is an idiot by being editor of that publication, regardless who he is.

item wrote:

The DAT1 will play audio CDs, from a spinning optical drive, in realtime - but why would anyone want to? Far better to conduct a controlled, null-checked, rip with EAC or dBpoweramp, and play precisely the same zeros-and-ones from local, DC-filtered solid state storage.

Romy the Cat wrote:

oxric wrote: By analogy, an Item Audio equipped with an optional blu-ray drive would serve precisely this function. It would spin a disc, extract the data and code it so that it is available for the next stage in the chain. Yes it might but it needs to do it in real time. I do not think at this point Item Audio “transport” performs this rudimental transport duty.

It does.

item wrote:

Romy the Cat wrote:  oxric wrote: By analogy, an Item Audio equipped with an optional blu-ray drive would serve precisely this function. It would spin a disc, extract the data and code it so that it is available for the next stage in the chain. Yes it might but it needs to do it in real time. I do not think at this point Item Audio “transport” performs this rudimental transport duty. It does.

item wrote:

The data ripped to the hard disk is - absolutely precisely - the same as the data on the CD.

item wrote:

So they were comparing apples with apples: a CD transport playing Track A on DAC B; then a computer transport playing the same Track A on DAC B.