hugo@griggs.dartmouth.edu (Peter Su) (01/25/90)
In the latest TAS, HP interviewed Ken Johnson of Reference recordings about the ins and outs of CD. Now, on the whole I thought the interview was informative and fun, but there was one thing that bugged me. When they were talking about digital tape to tape copying, they seemed to imply that the copies several generations down would not sound as good for reasons having to do with timing, and sample-and-hold circuits. The implication of the statement seemed to be that somewhere between the transport and the digital out is a sample and hold circuit that messed up the timing of the bitstream. I was under the impression that sample-and-hold circuits would only be present in either the A/D or D/A parts of a player, and have nothing whatsoever to do with actually recovering the bitstream. Is Johnson totally out in left field? Or am I misinterpreting his statements? On a related note, if these players really do transmit a bad bitstream, they must be really pitiful. I mean, we've been transmitting bits off of hard disks for decades (almost), and that hardly ever goes wrong. What's the deal here? It is just bad hardware? Do CD players need an SCSI interface :-)? Thanks, Pete