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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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In Reply to: Re: Toshiba 3990 pauses between tracks? (long) posted by TomLarson on November 25, 2006 at 07:52:19:
Good points Tom. I felt compelled to pen a few words during your breakfast break:
Quote:"
Point 1: I just don't get how the Toshiba can sound this good this cheap.Point 2: In the quote from the Stereophile article in a lower post, Aktinson says he personally would spend the 'extra' $1,950 to get the somewhat better sound of the Moon player (or whatever) he is reviewing. OK,that's fine, but if Toshiba can do something close for $50, someone out there--the old Mod Squad, the new ???--ought to be able to do it using this machine, charge $500 and still make a huge profit.
Point 3: The main thing the Toshiba is reinforcing for me is how sick the hi end industry is. It's become a rich man's game...
Some answers:
- Point 1-Good but cheap: The use of a single clock eliminates many of the low frequency jitter beat issues from multiple clock/crystal designs back in the 90s. The use of static memories needed to buffer and build video line data in the DVD transport stream also provide a degree of isolation from jitter induced by the transport servoing/tracking/seeking hash. There are other details but I also think Toshiba engineers know how to listen.
- Point 2-Atkinson's 3950 review comments: I personally felt similar to JA about the unit and needed to get to the next level. His only route is $$$ and for "some" it is a cap/op-amp upgrade route. Would have been nice if he had tried it as a transport or stuck some rollerballs on it. Getting someone "there" to listen to a modified unit is not their mandate...evenly slightly modified would put his $1950 number in a new perspective but it is based on the $$$ route at his disposal and beckon call. There are outfits/companies(RAM, Underwood) that will put out warrantied upgraded units in the $500 range.
- Point 3-Sickness and $$$ game: CD is a 30 year old format with constant refinement and Moore's law (doubling of transistor count each 4 years) of increasing transistor count to help it sort out the vinyl to CD quandry. Kudos to Toshiba to being able to play in the features war(slow, angle, A-B repeat, menu, subtitle, 16:9, composite, component out) but its great to see they got the L/R audio jacks (and video)at a very decent level. Still I rather pay another $10 for 20% more quality than what a Walmart economy supports. Is there no middle ground? THX and multi-channel has bloated the basic one size fits all family entertainment set but I bet not many of those get just 2 channel sounding right...imagine trying to get 7 speaker's right for music. For video, it's just immersion and more speaker's cannot hurt...just don't use the word fidelity in the same breath.
cheers,
PeAK
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Follow Ups
- Re: Toshiba 3990 industry thoughts(long) - PeAK 09:55:14 11/25/06 (0)
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