Actually there have been discussions of good ripping I think it was MarkH that wrote an excellent post on using EAC etc.

Getting the bits off intact these days is fairly easy even with cheap equipment. The same $100.00 ROM drive ($20.00 on E-bay surplus) used in the 598, G98 can get the bits off as well as my $50.00 toshiba compouter ROM.

A lot of high priced CD player companies go to huge costs to just get the bits off with seperate power supplies for the mechanical, digital and analog systems. And complex mechanical dampening. This is just utter nonsense. But if folks want to use that argument the squeezebox totally isolates the digital process by having a seperate standalone device dedidicated to that one task.

Reading bits slower and repeatably until you get them right is easier on the PC than in a player because you have more time. You also have the time to compute checksums and compare your results to public databases to verify quality.

So I don't even factor reading CD's into the equation and if anything I suggest a PC can do it better.

The only difference is playing it. And playing the digital stream just isn't that hard to do today. Sure the 800 or 808 may have better jitter (we don't really know) because it's fairly hard to measure in way everyone agrees. It's also argued very heavily if humans can even hear the effects of 50ps of jitter effect on the DAC (on the AVS Forums).

And the ability of the 861 to copy the bits to a memory buffer and reclock them out internally really equals the playing field. Again as I stated above the 861 recieves every single bit from a 800 to SqueezeBox (fairly easy to test and prove with digital outputs on the 861).

800/808/G98's (to me) make sense for analog setups. Where they can do their dejitter thing internally before the DACs. They also seemlessly operate in all Meridian setups and cosmetically match the processor. But for playing CD's into a Meridian processor they have little added value to the audio quality.

If you really want to improve on this. You have to have a single master clock (external word clock) that drives the DAC and the transmission of bits from the CD buffer (which is done probably in analog versions of 808i).

Last edited by George Mills; 2007-09-13 14:08.
- Fiddler (IMHO)

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