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In Reply to: "Time Remaining" Indicator posted by Luminator on February 8, 2007 at 14:43:00:
Here we go again, lack of countdown clock and the player is discriminated against.This is THE most ridiculous thing I have ever read on this forum. I am surprised anybody would even think about something like this as a showstopper when purchasing a CD player.
If you are looking at the clock counting down while listening to music you and your friends are in this hobby for a wrong reason.
Follow Ups:
According to your profile, you've been registered since March 2001, and this is the MOST ridiculous thing you've read on this formum in five years and eleven months? Wow! You have read selectively.Ok, just busting you a bit in all good humor - no offense.
But here is my take on this:
Since 1986 when I bought my first CD player, I've used the reverse time function maybe half a dozen times, maybe a dozen, not more. Clearly it's not an indispensible feature for me, but it is helpful to have occasionally for anyone (e.g., let's say you sort of have to pee, but not too urgently, and you're listening to a CD for the first time, and want to know if that song is almost over, in which case you'll hold it, or is a 20 minute jam session, in which case you'll have an accident, or at least get uncomfortable, and the CD case is on the other side of the room?). And for folks who do recording the feature probably is very important. And anyway, why would it be so hard for any manufacturer to include? One thing that pisses me off about this hobby is the widely believed truism that high end audio equipment need not include any convenient features and has license to be as quirky as the manufactures want. I just think that's rubbish. When I complained recently about a bizzare quirk inherent in one of my pieces of equipment, my dealer, who I like for the most part, said that people like me "may not be well suited to own *truly* highend gear"! Now THAT was the most ridiculous thing I had heard in . . . well at least in a few days!
I'm not busting on this player, which I am sure sounds fantastic and generates very high customer satisfaction. But I think Lumy does us all a service when he points out (1) features that are absent on popular players, (2) how easy it would be to include them and (3) how helpful it would be if the mainstream audio media would simply bother to include such coverage in their reviews. Then someone like you, and maybe me, can buy the player anyway and someone like Lumy can avoid it. I don't understand why he's being attacked for that.
I agree that some "hi-end" manufacturers omit standard features and I am against it. I can also see why some can find the countdown clock useful but not to the point of disregarding it as one of the purchase options.
So Ayre forgot about it, oh well, I hope it has a clock forward feature.What is annoying is that someone can repeatedly voice his general opinion on the player based exclusively on this minor feature and never mentions the sound the player produces.
You couldnt be further from the truth.Time remaining allows the listener to 'see' the exact arrangement/structure of every track as they listen. It illuminates the deeper structure of the track beyond the local melody. It is much harder to do without it. With it, it is there in front of you the whole time.
There are liner notes with track lengths printed. Let's say it says "4:50" for a particular track. You see the seconds ticking upward toward 4:50. If you're at 3:50, I think you can rest assured that there will be 1:00 left to go. Always works for me.
So you're staring at the numbers ticking away instead of looking into a soundstage, huh? Oh wait, there IS no imaging and soundstaging in your system! Oh, ok, keep looking at the numbers.
Soundstage, imaging?These dont tell you anything about the arrangement of music. Arrangement is phrasing, bars, beats, chorus, verse, motifs, timing changes key changes, counterpoint. Its called "music" as opposed to audio reproduction.
Thats what 'time remaining' allows you to see. And yes you can do it by checking the total time in the liner notes, but that means having to reference the packaging every time a track starts. With time remaining you look at the player as soon as it starts to see how long it is.
I'm pretty sure that HumanMedia was just joking. Well, at least I hope so...
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