Review

Is Fremaux still active? (I guess he would be late 80s or 90ish now, so maybe unlikely)? I picked up an old EMI Ibert disc secondhand recently which is excellent (although I found that someone had kindly highlighted things in the booklet with a yellow marker pen). I also have some excellent Walton he recorded for EMI.

Ted 

OK. Clearly a clear lack of clarity!

Reminds me of one of my school-teachers " Johnson, how can you write clearly if you don't think clearly?"

Anyway you've certainly got it very muddled. That must be my fault so I'll start again and try to do better! In the meantime I've had some further thoughts so please, just forget the previous attempt and start from here:

First, my starting point is that you can hear a difference, Andrew can hear a difference, and so there is a difference to be heard. And what can be heard is the bottom line. You and I would both like to have a logical explanation for the difference.

Second, the difference has two components. The former concerns whether the CD is played directly or first ripped and then streamed. The latter concerns the quality of the streaming process. The latter might (e.g. if it is concerned with the D-A conversion process) also apply to playing of a CD, though there you have argued strongly that it is easier to improve the quality of a streamed source than a CD.

OK so far?

First mystery: why should a streamed file stored on hard disc but made from a CD played in a cheap CD drive on a computer sound better than a CD played directly? 

This I find hard to take and nothing in TedR's analysis makes it sound credible. That's the first puzzle.

Second mystery: what improvement could be made to a streaming device that would not similarly improve the quality of CD playback? To me that's an even bigger puzzle.

With regard to the 'first mystery' the following comes to mind (only since this morning). If as you suggest even a cheap streaming device sounds better than quite an expensive CD player, why does not some enterprising manufacturer make a player that rips the CD on to a temporary solid state store and play it back from there. The delay would only be a few seconds and high quality could be obtained very cheaply. (Hm. Perhaps I should have patented this idea!).

I cannot make all this add up. And I'm not sure we are near to being able to. Perhaps Andrew will prove me wrong.  After all, if I were the Linn engineer tasked with improving the quality of a streaming device I'd want some solid facts to work on.

My comment about charlatans in no way was about Linn or other reputable firms. Rather about some companies that exploit the mythology, the lack of knbowledge, rather than trying to understand it: I'm thinking of the sort of bizarre fringe ideas with no basis in fact: the inverted eggcups that you place under the legs of your chair to remove unwanted vibrations from goodness knows what (a purely fictional example, I hope, but you get the idea).

Is that any better? Anyway probably time to get back to music!!

Chris

PS: I fully understand your holding on to recordings that were formative experiences. I expect we all have some of those! Some persist, some drift away.

PPS: I await your mark out of 10.

'It is my understanding that the ripped file is not "played in a cheap CD drive on a computer", its ripped content is read from a hard drive (in a computer or a NAS) then "played" by the DS"

Yes indeed, but how did it get on to the computer/hard drive?

"The mystery for me is what the DS does with the file [that a CD player cannot] to produce the music.  How does the thing work in other words?"

Agreed!  My addition in square brackets.

Chris

We need Andrew!

As I understood it you are starting, not with a download but with a CD, which you have transferred via computer to a hard drive. Am I mistaken?

Impossible. You put the disc in, you hear the motor going whirr, whirr, whirr, the pits on the CD are read by a laser, just the same moving parts as in your CD player. It's what happens next that's different.  The CD is scanned much faster and the data are stored on the hard disc after multiple reads for error correction, and the result may be a FLAC file. No?

As I think we agreed earlier, we are stuck! We need Andrew, or perhaps TedR, but let's be quite clear, a FLAC file does not read something, it is something you get when data has been read. You can also get a FLAC file via a download, as you know.

The best analogy is with a book. The FLAC file is the book, Someone has to write the book, then anyone can read it. Similarly the FLAC file has to be written. A file cannot read something any more than a book can. 

The critical question then is how the FLAC file is produced from the CD.