High Capacity CD Changer/Transport
Jun 15, 2002 at 4:02 AM Thread Starter Post #1 of 29

Nezer

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As I posted on another thread I'm looking at some high-end sources but they all have a fairly large flaw; they are single disc players.

All of the ones I'm considering though have digital inputs (Cary 306/200 is on the top of my must-hear list).

With this in-mind I would like an uber-CD Changer to use a a transport. The first requirement might seriously blow me out of the water though as it *must* support a *minimum* of 500 discs!! More would actually be better.

All I can really find are 400 disc changers.

Other features that would be nice include CD-Text. A coax digital output is preferable but, again, I may have a hard time finding this.

One option I have considered just throws-out the changer all together but offers nearly infinite expansion; using a computer with some serious DASD (disk storage) as the 'transport' and feed the digital output of a decent soundcard (say one of m-audio's offerings) into the uber-source I'm looking into.

I would use winamp with Monkey's audio to compress everything though which would only mean about 1.2TB of storage to get 500 average discs online. I know it sounds like a lot but it isn't (I've installed a SAN that had 4 TB of raw storage online and I currently support a tabe library (think cd changers for DLT tapes) that has about 3.5 TB online. Larger ATAPI drives these days are around 120 GB so I would only need 10 of them. Of course this leads me to another product that likly doesn't exist; a 10-channel ATA controller that supports RAID-0.

The next step is to look at SCSI, but that would likly price me right out of my house and the fact is I don't need that kind of performance. This would though be MUCH easier to manage than an ATA solution as a single wide scsi bus can support 15 device IDs (and each of those with at least 8 LUNs which is a LOT of devices) whereas the IDE only supports a max of two per channel with a *serious* performance penalty for even that.

The last option is to use more reasonable storage options and encode with Lame like I currently do on my portable jukebox and use Winamp with MAD. If I go this route though I'm not extracting all of the goodness that can be had out of the DAC in the CDP though it would likly still satisfy the whole reason I'm getting the high-end CDP in the first place. but then there is an unknown of what other flaws it will expose.

I'd like, if at all possible to keep the price on this thing under $1000 with a $1500 limit at the absolute max. Beyond that price I'll just go the MP3 route for casual listening and drop-in CDRs by-hand for the more intensive sessions.

Maybe someone has some other ideas or a pointer to a massive DIY robotic CD changer option thus allowing me to use the transport in the CDP as it was intended.

How is it that no one makes products for people like me?
 
Jun 15, 2002 at 4:58 AM Post #2 of 29
sounds like some serious hardware you got planned!

but you need drives not backup media like tapes else what is the point, ie linear read and what's raid-0? extra parity check? or mirror!

you could also setup a few boxes, lan them together and have a distributed, expandable music network.

i wouldnt bother with scsi for a music system, a few raid-5 boxes would be nice.
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Jun 15, 2002 at 5:40 AM Post #3 of 29
I just read in a magazine (Sound and Vision? T3? Stuff?) about a guy who wired his whole house with a hard-disk-based sound system. I didn't buy the magazine, so can't verify, but the headline (on the cover) was "$1,000,000 sound system! Is it worth it?" or something like that (would have been pounds instead of dollars if it was a British magazine).

There was a small rant at copy-protection in there, LOL!

I got two words for you: Lego Mindstorms.
 
Jun 15, 2002 at 6:35 AM Post #6 of 29
I use my Sony 400 disc changer with my MSB dac/w upsampling card.It sounds great and I can change music as I please.2 400 disc changers can be linked together as well for an 800 disc system which can be used as a transport.Total cost of my system is less than $800.00.the Sony sells for $300.00 everywhere and the MSB dac sells for $450.00 at Music Direct.this is a very good set-up and I compromise very little in terms of ultimate sound quality.
 
Jun 15, 2002 at 3:08 PM Post #7 of 29
Quote:

Originally posted by Tuberoller
I use my Sony 400 disc changer with my MSB dac/w upsampling card.It sounds great and I can change music as I please.2 400 disc changers can be linked together as well for an 800 disc system which can be used as a transport.Total cost of my system is less than $800.00.the Sony sells for $300.00 everywhere and the MSB dac sells for $450.00 at Music Direct.this is a very good set-up and I compromise very little in terms of ultimate sound quality.


I'm more intrested in the DAC from the Cary or a Wadia then a stand-alone unit becasue there are more options at the high-end.

Does the MSB eliminate that high-pitched digital distortion that exists around 15khz+? If so I'm interested.

Can all 400 disc changers be linked together and is there a limit? How does one interface all those transports into a single-imput DAC? This sounds intriguing as it could be a reasonable solution.

About this Mindstorms tape bot, does anyone have a link? I'm quite intrigured.
 
Jun 15, 2002 at 4:19 PM Post #9 of 29
Quote:

Originally posted by eric343
There was an article on /. a while ago about some guy that did a Lego Mindstorms tape robot...


That's actually what made me think of it. I was thinking the interface with something like a Rega Planet would be fairly simple.

Nezer, here ya go .
 
Jun 15, 2002 at 4:26 PM Post #10 of 29
ROTFL... Could you imagine some budget-conscience IT manager having one of these built for an enterprise backup/data warehousing solution?

I'd actually LOVE to see something like this sitting on a datacenter's floor. I might just build one just to put it in a data center and get a picture of it!
 
Jun 15, 2002 at 4:41 PM Post #12 of 29
There are very few, if any, changers once you get to the really high quality CDP's. Best bet is to buy a high quality single disk player, and marry someone who won't punch your lights out for saying "Honey, could you please change the CD?" on a frequent basis...
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Jun 15, 2002 at 4:42 PM Post #13 of 29
Quote:

Originally posted by Nezer
ROTFL... Could you imagine some budget-conscience IT manager having one of these built for an enterprise backup/data warehousing solution?


Actually, that was my first thought, too. I emailed this link to other co-workers with the comment, "Do you think <our boss> would approve this in our budget?"
 
Jun 15, 2002 at 5:22 PM Post #15 of 29
Nezer
I'm with you here. Even though I'm one of those single-disc snobs when it comes to actual CD transports (IMHFO, transports have a lot of problems as it is... introducing an extra motor and stuff in there just because you're lazy is beyond me)---but I said I'm with you, and I am.

Here's the thing. You guys are going to banish me to voodoo island for saying this, but here it is: In my experience, Monkey's Audio format (.ape) from a hard drive sounds BETTER than the original CD sounds while playing from the disc it was ripped from. I think it has to do with EAC repolling to correct the errors and the reduced jitter because of not having the drive spinning but that's all just conjecture on my part, the only thing I can vouch for is that it DOES actually sound better.

So while I'm still a single disc CD snob at home, my work rig consists of a shared folder on a network drive on a 100 megabit switched network. I rip with EAC, encode with Monkey and playback with WinAmp, output to digital from the soundcard, convert to analog with the ART DI/O, amplify with the Corda and transduce with the Etymotic. I know it sounds ghetto but it's NOT bad at all.

And yeah, you can definitely do better with any of that stuff if you spend more money. If you end up with the 27ix and a multi-terrabyte server with all your discs encoded, I'm definitely going to be green with envy.
 

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