Some high-end CD players tempt the aesthete in search of audio perfection with offerings such as "belt drives," "large flywheels for steady rotation," CD rim weights, and vibration dampers.
What the suckers who pay ten times the cost of a standard player for these features don't know is that a CD player takes the music (represented as a sequence of numbers) from the disk and puts it into a computer-style memory. The numbers are then sent to the circuits that convert them into sound according to the incredibly even timing of a quartz crystal clock. If the memory begins to empty out, the motor to the disk is speeded up, and vice versa. Unsteady rotation of the disk (within broad limits) has no effect whatsoever on the quality of the sound coming out.
Another scam: A local record company claimed that it achieved higher fidelity in its CDs by beaming the digital signal in real-time to its CD master instead of making a digital tape on location and then replaying it later. But unlike analog tapes, making a digital copy incurs no loss of quality whatsoever. This whole exercise proves either that the engineers don't understand their own technology, or that they are confident their customers don't.
STREET CRED
The Ecology of CommerceCrashin' Windows
Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum, Pick the Wallets of the Dumb
Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers
Tumbling into the Paperless Office
