The Non-Technical
Reader's Guide to
Memory Playback
and RUR (tm)
The Memory Player(tm)...
"The most advanced CD playback system ever designed"


The Memory Player (tm) plays CDs in an entirely different way than
has been done before. This dialog is an explanation of how Memory
Playback differs from mechanical CD playback and why the fidelity
levels between the two are so vastly different.

In order to explain and clarify the unorthodox technologies that
were first designed for and first used by The Memory Player(tm), it
becomes important to understand how mechanical CD players
work and why they are limited to the performance level that is
largely unchanged in the CD's 25 year history.

This dialog will also aid the non-technical reader in understanding how
recording music worked in the analog era, how the CD changed the
basics of recording music and especially replaying music, and how in an
unforeseen way, it was both miraculous and disastrous from the point
of view of pure fidelity, a fidelity that is fairly limited to the lofty
demands of the HEA community.

A brief history of the CDs evolution through its varying incarnations
stressing first bit depths, then sampling rates, then reclocking and now
removing the bits, purifying them on to non-mechanical memory and
playing them electronically from it, ie: Memory Playback.












Continuity and Capsules
Packets of Power, Modules of Music, Blocks of Bits, Thanks Mr. Planck


Max Planck discovered that all energy/mass exists in packets or blocks.
More on this later in the dialog but it does illustrate something
important to ALL of recorded music: Sound is quantized. Where digital
and analog barely differ is in being recorded. Music is recorded,
transferred to a medium of some sort and played by the end user using
a reverse technology. This has essentially not changed since Edison's
wax. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

ALL recorded music is quantized. That is, a moment of music is
represented by an abstract entity and encapsulated into a given format.

This entity can be a magnetized area of a tape, a bump or a valley in a
groove of a record or, a bit or a group of bits on a CD. ALL of these
representations of moments of music in a period of time have enjoyed
enormous success and until the optical CD, there has been relatively
little difference between them philosophically.

ALL were "formats", a time period structure, filled with music.
A block of sound...much thanks, Max Planck.

And while we generally have seen improvements with each advancing
format and technology, we faced a duality of qualities when the CD
dominated recorded music. Fidelity was, for the first time, not the
primary motivation anymore but rather, durability and ubiquity became
CD's primary virtues.

In some very few respects, of course, the CD was superior to records
but in the HEA community we found very few who embraced the CD
due to its corruption of timbre, artificial tone, harsh high frequencies
and loss of subtle ambient information.

With slow, thin tape like cassettes and inexpensive ceramic cartridges
we expected and understood the loss of fidelity. But the sound you
heard was always less, not more, of something.

Something went awry in the natural path of the evolution of music
recording. Playback technologies were interrupted by a new and
unheard of addition to the musical information.

It was ADDITIONS, not losses, that changed the development of the CD
into the artificial sounding medium we'd soon have forced upon us and
one addition in particular: ERROR CORRECTION.

Two "additions" in particular doomed CD sound to the artificial nature
it suffered for 25 years:

1: CD error correction as touched on above, was birthed by a
cooperative effort by Sony and Phillips in August, 1982. The goal being
that with dirt and scratches, freezing Winters and burning Summers in
your car, fingerprints, physical damage, almost anything and the CD
would still play. No other audio medium had ever boasted such a stoic
technology before. If I drove a tank I'd never have to worry about
digging my car out of the snow but both the fuel economy and trying   
to find a parking space would be seriously compromised.
                                                   
2: Phillips asked Sony to reduce the strength of their ECC in order to
fit the entire Furtwangler's, Beethoven's 9th Symphony--------------------->
on a single CD. In order to ADD the 9th Symphony,
Sony had to SUBTRACT ECC resolution.











Real Estate Realities
"Good enough for Music"

Every music CD made since 1982 has about 1/3rd of its area filled with
error correction bits known as Reed-Solomon Codes and/or ECC---------->
(Error Concealment/Correction Codes).

To be more accurate, there are actually many other error correction and
error concealment codes on a CD and as there is no umbrella term to
encompass them all. So we will use the term "ECC" for the sake of
brevity of this dialog.

Proponents of Reed-Solomon (RS) coding should know that RS codes
can be designed to vastly different strengths and properties. RS for
DAT tape was vastly different than for CD. Even RS codes for CDs
varied depending upon the content. It was discovered early on that the
ECC that protected CDs with PROGRAMS on them required a far
stronger Reed-Solomon code than the RS code protecting CDs with
music on them or they would literally crash the computers.

This stronger ECC occupied 50% of the CDs surface. The weaker ECC,
only 33%.

And music CDs were no different although the designers thought
differently. RS coding for "just music" was relaxed while RS codes for
CDs carrying programs were very powerful.

It was decided that "errors shorter than 25 microseconds will be--->
considered inaudible" and "perfected" so a "relaxed" version of the
Reed-Solomon code used on the PROGRAM CDs would be used on
MUSIC CDs. Look at how much weaker the music protection is!

Phillips asked Sony to reduce the strength of their ECC in order
to fit the entire Furtwangler's, Beethoven's 9th Symphony on a
single CD. A record album barely held 45 minutes of recording
whereas a CD could hold over 70 minutes IF the ECC was reduced
in quality. One thousand times weaker.

This decision proved to be historic. It was this pivotal decision
that doomed CD sound to it's artificial nature, one that would
create an insurmountable chasm between the vinyl advocates and
the embracers of this new technology, for over two decades.

The weaker ECC code was known as RS 255/223* and was considered
















CD Error Correction
"See me, feel me, touch me.... and you can still hear me?"

Reed-Solomon. Error correction. Error concealment, Interpolation,
Parity codes, and more. These error correction codes are the CD
standard, and no CD will play at all without them.

Digititis or just "digital sound", has plagued CD playback since the first
14bit players were released in the 1980s. They were in a word, atrocious.

Despite audiophiles resistance, digital audio seemed inevitable, and in
the late 80s', audiophiles gobbled up all the quickly vanishing vinyl, as
they didn't know if recorded music could ever sound like music again!

The proponents of CD made claim to essentially one, and only one,
area of improvement that if improved, could bridge that chasm that
stood between the vinyl lovers and CD's musical Nirvana: JITTER

While defining jitter has many complex avenues we could take, in an
effort to define it succinctly:

Jitter can be defined as the error in the timing of all portions of the digital
audio chain NOT working in synchronicity.

How this worked is as follows: As the CD spins, it sends a "block", a
capsule of "bits" to a temporary memory called a "cache". This block
waits until the CD in its less than accurate rotation has caught up and is
ready to send the next block to this cache.

After the CD has uploaded the next block to this cache, the content is
played and the process repeated. The caches will have filled and
emptied millions of times and the blocks of bits, the very content we
seek to hear are fed to varying circuits of little import here with the
exception of the device that turns bits into music, the DAC - or,
" Digital to Audio Converter ".

As you can see at this point, the timing of a cheap piece of plastic spun
by a cheap little motor to circuits that require nanosecond accuracy to
eventually be delivered to the DAC, exactly in time* with the entire
chain that is previous to it, required a not so inexpensive device to
"marry them all in a timely manner". To try to reduce this timing error,
jitter as it was now called, the CLOCK was created to be the timekeeper
of every part of the digital audio system. And, improving the clock
became the implied panacea of all things wrong with CD.

If the clocking was perfect: NO JITTER. NO PROBLEMS...right?

Not as simple, unfortunately. Of course clocking is not perfect nor can
it ever be but, it is EXTREMELY good now and as such, has revealed
itself as a less important aspect of CD playback than once thought! It
was no panacea. Near zero jitter still "sounded digital".

Not to say that reducing jitter did not improve CD sound, for most
certainly, it did. But that sound, that "digital sound". No reduction of
jitter made any significant progress of ridding CD of its dry, airless,
acrylic, artificial tone and timbre. Vinyl, with all its faults, noise, clicks,
pops and mistracking, sounded like music. CD did not.

Why does this nanotechnological wonder, the CD, sound artificial, hard,
harsh, sterile and a-musical after 25 YEARS?













Blinded by the Laser Light
The perfection of the myth: "Bit-Perfection"

No clear answer surfaced. We knew of the tolerances in Reed-Solomon
codes but they were "inaudible". Lasers by definition, do not diffract.
We knew the lasers of the quality in CD players suffered diffraction,---->
and this too was "inaudible". Jitter was the only acceptable answer to all
questions concerning a "perfect" medium.

In part, by placing the onus of all things wrong with CD on jitter alone,
it prevented the questioning of "Bit-Perfection" as this was
unquestionable and always loomed as if it was sacrilegious to even
suggest questioning it.

We were, for still another decade, fixated on JITTER. The goal was to
align the timing from the CD to the DAC and so then clock accuracy was
still the primary imperative. But was it?

Clocking and reclocking seemed to enter the realm of the absurd. Not
unlike the "THD Wars" of the 1970s where ONLY lower THD mattered
and for a time, almost no one listened anymore. Instead they read spec
sheets.

Jitter has too reached the realm of "mythology" with atomic clocks
surfacing with incredible accuracy that gave us just another "baby step"
in improvement (as Arnis Balgalvis described progress in CD playback
once in Positive Feedback magazine in 2007 ), but got paid for with the
baby's college fund!

Today, clock accuracy and  synchronization along the entire chain is so
good and the improvements in CD players reclocking are so relatively
small, that it seems that neither clocks nor jitter were the cause of
"digital sound" as we know it, and we were forced to accept it for 2 1/2
decades.












The Memory Player&Memory Playback
"The first significant advancement in CD reading in 25 years"
Arnis Balgalvis, Positive Feedback magazine, 2007


A kind of fatalist, circular logic of the acceptance of CD became ubiquitous:

"It must be too low a sample rate","It must be too low a bit depth", "We're stuck
with 16/44", etc.

HOWEVER, a radical few, a few who came under tremendous ridicule in audio
forums, a few proposed that a new CD playback concept had already become a
reality, thanks to the advent of the power of modern computers.

The PC did bring to the average audiophile or end user a complex processing power
that only ten years prior would cost have cost more than a home. Because of this
technology, a once highly controversial and abstract concept became a reality in the
Winter of 2003...

A CD player that plays ONLY the music bits, (that is, bits
representing music, not repair bits added later) and NONE of the
error codes, is a concept that is not strange to 32-bit mixers in most
recording studios. Yet the mantra echoed in audio forums
 seemed to literally shout down the dissenters, the thinkers,
the creators:

"CD is bitperfect and no bits are ever lost because of Reed-Solomon
and ECC and if you are hearing any advantages in improving
CD reading, they are imaginary".

In order to see (and hear) how the 2 1/2 decades of burying one's head
in the sand kept CD from stealing the hearts of true of music lovers and
audiophiles, we need to explain what Reed-Solomon codes can and
cannot do, and what actually IS that sound known as "Digititis".

But not all in the audio forums sought to destroy that which they did
not understand. In fact, one maverick, a lofty-minded writer, also in
Positive Feedback, Clark Johnsen, countered the above traditionalism
with this far bolder and more intrepid statement:

"Theory told us (or so we were told!) that a certain number of samples, a few simple
operations, some well-understood error correction coding (ECC) and so forth would
produce a fixed result, at least within the digital domain. Bits are bits! It's all in the
numbers!"

"But it wasn't a done deal.........Few were forthcoming, and none that addressed the
situation overall. None, that is, until Mark Porzilli advanced a narrative so daring,
so unheard-of, so ritually unacceptable that many tried (as they often do) to laugh it
off the stage."






The First audition;

"Now, the Memory Player....We are gathered—Rob Hart (former columnist-The
Audio Tweakers), Alan Eichenbaum (former columnist-The Audio Tweakers,
President; Scaena Loudspeaker Corporation) and myself—in Rob's spacious Fort
Lauderdale living room this past December.

The occasion: My first private hearing of the Memory Player from Nova Physics,
about which I had been first to write. Those views were later expanded by
Arnis Balgavis and others elsewhere. In fact, the Memory Player was felt by every
auditioner to be quite the finest CD source they had ever heard, if at a price."

"We are listening to whatever had been stored on this unit's disc drive by visitors to
the Stereophile show. Yes we might upload something ourselves, but you know what?
Everything sounds so good, so listenable, so faultless sonically, so absent of
enharmonic edgy artifacts, so musically involving, that we almost passively accept
one selection after another. This is not our usual style!"

"The Memory Player, while presenting far and away the finest digital reproduction
I've ever heard—including SACD. cj"












The Clocking Myth
"Time is on our side...yes it is"

You all know that a CD is a 16bit / 44100hz medium. This means that
every 1/44100th of a second, it plays a block or blocks of bits.

This period of TIME is the very nexus of the difference between
mechanical CD players and Memory Players.

Clock Accuracy and Synchronization "connect" the Player with the DAC
and all that is necessary in between.

What is important to note is that these genuinely miraculously accurate
clocks synchronize the Sample Period with all other parts of the chain.

The sample is clocked to the chain of components, NOT the bits in the
sample!

If it sounds as if you are towing a car without checking if the occupants
have left it, it is. The Sample Period is, in CD's case, is a 1/44100th of a
second window of time where the laser may seek bits. The bits "float"
around during the sample period, a 25 microsecond period of random
bit dropping, corruption and bit  inversion (from noise) and many
times, properly read bits.

What this demonstrates that these clocks may synchronize samples
containing bits with incredible accuracy, but they allow bits to be read
as late as 25 microseconds late, or any number from 0-25 microseconds
late.

In other words, while the sample is in sync with the rest of the system
with great accuracy, the bits are NOT!

The bits can be read at any time during that sample period, correct or
not, and still be considered perfectly read or "Bitperfect".

The sample period is 25 microseconds long and the bits in the sample
can corrupt in a myriad of ways, many described below.












Analog Analogies
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
Alphonse Karr (1808-90)


Our universe is not contiguous. It consists of packets of energy that
move in quantized time periods. This was first discovered by
Max Planck in 1900, the elemental quanta. Science was forever changed.
This discovery made things like Relativity, the Atomic Bomb and the
CD possible.

Because of this discovery, we are forever mindful that there is no true
analog because of this and that digital science is as analog as...analog.

Here we explore the near identical nature of CD with vinyl and the
reverse:

As an analogy, if we listen to vinyl and the stylus skips a groove, we
don't get to hear those few seconds of music in the skipped groove.
Same with CD. A vibration, a speck of dust, whatever and a bit is
dropped; we will not hear the music that bit represented.

This all changed with the introduction of the error codes and ECC.

A dual-nature example:

When the groove of the record is skipped or when a bit is dropped, the
error correction devices create a simulation of what was most probably
in the skipped groove/or dropped bit and inserts where the skipped
groove/bit hole would have been.

We now hear a composite of a computer-generated estimation of what
was there and actual music information, mixed. If it sounds weird and
artificial, it's because it is.

Had the introduction of error correction not been implemented in CD,
we probably would find that CD is really quite similar to vinyl, without
the tracking and resonance troubles in the bass.

But despite the addition of error correction bits, the original musical
information IS still on the CD. And there is a method to extract only
music bits and therefore, play only music:  Memory Playback













Memories of Memory, Caches & RAM
Bad memories of great music

It is no simple task to explain how complex it is to remove music bits
from a CD without removing ECC and its cohorts from a CD. Every time
the music stream from the CD is fragmented by the placement of
portions of it on memory, it must be reassembled if you will.

As ECC required the CD have enough time to look back and add
recreations of what was lost, it also required a place to hold this section
of bits while this process took place.

In other words, in order to use ECC, they created two more areas of
potential bit re-ordering, RAM and THE CACHE. ------------------------------->

As mentioned above, the cache is a small piece of memory that holds a
portion of CD data before it is sent on to the DAC for listening. The
cache creates this delay to ensure that the CD has enough time to rotate
and upload the next sequence of bits as CD rotation is not very accurate.

When uploaded blocks of bits have reached the cache, they no longer
can be "corrected" in any way. In fact, the cache is extremely vulnerable
to corruption because the rest of the circuitry is "blind" to the cache.

It gets worse: The method that caches write the bits to it is in the order
that is the fastest, NOT the original order of music bits. In fact, even
NOISE can cause a "Logic Inversion"(change a zero into a one) while
data is in this most vulnerable of states, "caching."------------------------------>

And if ECC et al was the only area of digital audio corruption, we could
stop here but in fact, there are different types of memory that can
preserve or corrupt the order in which the bits are written!

For example: The type of memory used in CD player's caches and a
computer's RAM* can destroy original bit sequences and reorder bits to
populate more quickly, (*Random Access Memory...need we say more!)
rather than the original music bit order. This circuitous path is
somewhat illustrated in the block diagrams indicating how caches and
RAM must "decompress" (reversing the incorrect bit order in which it
was written) before the information is usable.

With sequential memory, it is written to more slowly, but it was never
out of order so there is no "compressed" information to try to return to
the original bit order.------------------------------------------------------------------------->

These error correction codes allow a recreated error correction bit to be
created as much as 25 microseconds LATE and still fall under the title
of bit-perfection. If we convert the TIME these codes are created when a
bit drops, and the time the replacement bit is actually played into actual
distances of late playback, the differences can be.................confounding.
As if you're hearing the CD for the first time (see "Testimonials").

Any bit recreated within that much error in time is considered perfect
or bit-perfect, as the lingo goes. So the "perfection"they extol is proven
by the math itself as "perfect up to a point" or within a tolerance which
of course MUST be the case with everything in Nature. To assert that
ANYTHING in mathematics is "perfect" is contrary to the nature of
mathematics. Math is not infinite. It creates explanations within a range
of what is considered acceptable but NEVER, "perfect".












Real-World Perspectives:
Being late is not better than never

To put that time error in perspective, sound travels at a
specific rate in air at most elevations where humans dwell,
so the "lateness" of bit recreation and the amounts it can
reorder bits and still qualify as "Bitperfect" can be directly
translated into physical distance.

If you had a 2-way speaker with a tweeter and a midrange or
mid/woofer,crossed over at say, 5000hz, the bit error timing,
still within BitPerfect parameters could suffer enough delay
to equate to moving the tweeter 6 INCHES behind the midrange!
And the "lateness" can change randomly from 0" to 6"-------------->

Serious, random phase shift. Imagine this happening on your speakers
as you play CDs, because it does. But it gets worse. Our brains
compensate somewhat to continuous sound aberrations, and we adapt.

For example: Carnegie is soft, Fischer is bright, we know. Adapt and the
concert sounds wonderful. If you've ever sat in front of a bright speaker
for hours you'd notice that everything sounds dull until you have time
to readjust.

These ECC codes exhibit this TIME error RANDOMLY. So to return to
the tweeter analogy, the tweeter would in effect, move from 6" behind to
1" behind to 3" behind, or any value in between - completely RANDOM,
and our brains cannot "lock" on to this completely unnatural
phenomena. It just sounds artificial, because IT IS.

We now can see why we simply cannot resolve random changes in
arrival times of portions of the music. They sound synthetic, artificial
and create harmonics (as do all sounds) of these artificial fundamentals,
adding still more artificially created sounds that have NO relation to
the music bits as they were created after the music has been played.
They blur the music bits as they pollute them, and the artificial nature
of them is omnipresent.

A well-pressed CD that is pristinely clean will of course generate less of
these codes but regardless, they are literally generated continuously as
a CD plays. It has been paradoxically suggested that "ECC is why CDs
are bitperfect, yet ECC is rarely invoked". ------------------------------------------->

This contradiction has been suggested many times. It makes no sense, so
it would make no sense to address it.

What IS important is to stress that there are MANY error correction
codes that are invoked literally on every block of bits. Parity Bits and
Sub-coding are just two. We explore these and others in greater depth
in the "Technical Guide" (for the Non-Technical Reader) and we make
note of them here to alert the reader that there are many types of error
correction codes and still more errors generated by the wrong types of
memory as well as the dissection of the bits and their reconstruction
never being quite "perfect".Nothing is.----------------------------->

It has been said that "Reed-Solomon error correction is
perfect so if the Memory Player sounds better,
it is not for this reason". They are mathematically,
subjectively,objectively, wrong. See the "Technical Guides".

Streams of anti-Memory Player rhetoric weaken in the
audio forums as the Memory Player owners grow in
number, as more the rave reviews continue to come forth,
and as the copycats grow in number and release
their own "memory players".

The traditionalists are losing the fight. It is a fight as predictable as
human nature itself as big egos strain to protect the small knowledge
that they fear losing.

As for Nova Physics, after 4 years of study and 2 years of production, we
now believe, and categorically assert, that it is not and never has been
the RESOLUTION (16/44.1) of CD that was the dominant difference in
sound between digital and analog audio.

Consider this:

BOTH use a quanta of something to represent recorded music,
BOTH try to play as much of that original information as possible,
BOTH never reach perfection but come close to 100% and
BOTH have no fundamental reason to sound essentially different aside
from resolution and strengths where electronic playback will not suffer
mechanical playback limitations.

It is Redbook CD which suffers the most from that which ECC and
other error correction technologies creating bits that were not present
on the master, pollute the original and do not represent anything
natural in the recording of the music.




















The Memory Player(tm) with RUR(tm)
"The most sophisticated CD playback system ever designed"

A brief retrace for continuity's sake: A music bit simply represents a
moment of music in time. If ONLY music bits could be heard, the only
difference between analog and digital would be almost nothing but
resolution as nothing artificial exists anymore. Even vinyl is quantized
as is all of nature.

To that end, enter The Memory Player(tm). The Memory Player(tm) extracts
ONLY music bits from a CD, and deposits them on non-mechanical,
SEQUENTIAL memory to avoid jitter from spinning ROMs and hard
drives. It's pure, electronic memory. It can't move so it can't shake, it
can't shake, no jitter. Measurable, almost ZERO laser (read) jitter. It also
suffers no "Bit-Reordering" from the use of Random Access Memory or
other memory that populates with bits according to the nearest vacancy
on the memory instead of using the next, sequential space (1,2,3...etc).

How it accomplishes this is when The Memory Player(tm) misses a bit,
the location is notated, and the laser returns to THAT area and rereads
the CD instead of using ANY form of error correction or recreated bits.

This technology known as "Read Until Right"(tm) or "RUR (tm)", was
developed at Nova Physics in 2004 to replace all forms of error
correction. It can literally reread 150X to try to locate a dropped music
bit, as there is no error correction anymore. It will move the laser in
many different positions "looking" for lost bits until it finds them, reads
them and deposits them on the memory in the original sequence. If it fails
to find a dropped bit, an instant of silence occurs, not unlike the record
skipping a groove although these instances average under 2%.

Once complete, the music bits only play from non-mechanical,
sequential memory. The latter, not being mechanical, as it cannot
vibrate, has NO jitter. As it populates in numerical order, ONLY music
bits are heard as they were heard in the studio. The rereading has
captured virtually all of them, and more often than not, you are virtually
listening to the master tape when you play a CD from memory.

On many CDs, clean and with no scratches, The Memory Player will
reach 100%, or virtually the master itself. But even Read Until Right
(RUR) can drop a bit but what you do hear was on the master. You hear
nothing artificial or created afterwards.

In a very real sense, it IS "analog playback of digital music". Odd, but
if you think about the process, it's virtually identical to a record or a
tape. "Nothing is new, just newly discovered".

So in a sense, The Memory Player (tm) is not new. And neither are the
pronouncements of denouncements of self-appointed "experts" trying
to reduce high technology world to a level they can understand.
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Above:

The original marquee for
Karel Capek's play: "RUR".
R.U.R. was an acronym for:
"Rossum's Universal Robots"
which debuted in Prague, 1920.

The play presented man's
creation of robotics to assist in
daily chores until the robots
became intelligent enough to
attempt to conquer the world.

Unfortunately for the sake of
music, 25 years ago,
ECC did just that!

The plays  success was far
reaching : Virtually every
encyclopedia or textbook
etymology of the word "robot"
mentions the play R.U.R. by
Karel Capek.

The original RUR robot below:
------------------------------------------->
<------------------------------------------
"In summary, Error correction IS the primary  
difference between digital and analog sound for
once it is removed, all that's left is...
...MUSIC."
++++ = ?
CD micrograph showing large gaps
and ECC sub-bits interwoven with
music bits and the far longer areas
for time errors (bit-reordering)
DVD micrograph showing similar
architecture to CD but far shorter
periods of ECC bits potentially
reordering of the original music bit
order
Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon
The Remote Control Computer
from Dell (tm )(notebook) wirelessly
accesses every CD in your
collection and controls every
function of The Memory Player
without ever rising from your chair!
"When observation conflicts with knowledge,
it is then time for
the observation of knowledge"
The 1924, original patent document
for the "Lead in and Out Grooves"
for 78rpm records
Final Thoughts: Indictment by Design
"Good Enough for Music"

As new formats emerge, they will, by virtue of faster sampling rates,
suffer less corruption from ECC than CD does. The Memory Player (tm)
supports all DAD/DVDA/HD-DVD and Blu-Ray audio discs and
improves them by the same method but it improves CD the most
dramatically by far as the slow sample rate allows the most time for
error correction to pollute the music bits.

Still, nothing we could say could be absolutely convincing that
Redbook CD is severely polluted by ECC, and that this flaw is
correctable by rereading.

To that end, we'll let the statements and numbers of the designers of
the CD say it for us.

Brief but worth repeating, is that in 1982, the designers of the CD
decided to allocate 33% of the MUSIC CD to Reed-Solomon error
correction. HOWEVER they allocated a full 50% of the CD to error
correction when the CD contained a PROGRAM.

Only 33%? Why? "Because"33% is good enough for music." ----------------->
Memory Scrubbing:   This technology is common in high-end computers
in that it "flushes" the memory banks clean on powering down or when
restarting.  The same technique is used in The Memory Player; however,
the "flushing" takes place after each use.  The reason is that the memory
MUST be populated with music bits only, and in their original sequence,
or the integrity of the timing between bits played will suffer. On
computers, the timing errors can be atrocious, but they are usually
unimportant in programs (where bit totals are most important) or low
fidelity music files. On CD players, they are disastrous, and are largely
masked with error correction bits.

On The Memory Player, they are "scrubbed" after each track or CD.

The memory is "flushed" of what is called "legacy" bits, bits that are
uploaded by programs used previously, but are "in the way" when the next
CD is trying to write each bit sequentially. When these leftover bits are in
the needed space, the music bits are written out of order in the nearest
vacant areas, corrupting the original timing of the music bits. The pieces
of the programs previously used that stay on memory that are the worst
offenders to memory purity:  the DLLs. See below for details.

DLL Unloading: Perhaps the single greatest jitter creator, DLLs
(Dynamic Link Libraries, part of all digital programs). DLLs lie on
memory as huge blocks that the purified music information must be
written around, causing obvious delays in reading contiguous portions of
the music on memory. On CD drives, DLLs fill caches and RAM, and
retard and distort the sequence of new music bit flow and population.
Bits must be written in the next vacant area on the memory, instead of
the next sequential area. These "obstacles" cause timing errors, as not
every bit is written in the identical way. The result: Jitter, and even more
importantly, Bit Timing Errors.


Intelligent Defragmentation: While less important sonically, it is very  
important to general performance. A highly fragmented memory will
require the reader to "search" for the fragments of information required
for sequential playback of the music file. It also manifests as the gradual
slowing of responsiveness. The Memory Player detects inactivity and
defragments the Music Libraries and both internal operating systems, the
Memory OS and the GUI OS (NTFS) automatically. If you start to use any
process on The Memory Player, it detects this, stops defragmenting and
"waits" until you are no longer using it, to resume until complete.


"SCN Chips" (Surface Charge Negation): Elusive and difficult to measure
because measuring static discharges static. But not as Heisenberg-ian!
That said, SCN is a remedy for this poltergeist-like bit corrupter.  One can
best measure performance, comparatively, in a normal environment, and
then in a static-free environment. The DAC in The Memory Player, being
that it supports full 32bit processing at 215mhz, is relatively 'unstrained',
as 16bit, 44/.1khz (CD) computations are exponentially slower and much
smaller. However, these extremely fast-operating frequencies make the
DAC sensitive to static electricity, so a Nova Physics proprietary chip
surface is utilized to inhibit the development of static. This treatment
measurably lowers jitter, and it even negates some Gaussian Noise.


Spectrum Spreading: Last and least, but still important. The clocks used
in The Memory Player use this technique that "divides" the clock into
multiple sections, such that they are too low in amplitude to energize a
resonance, yet when recompiled, it is as precise as before, and has almost
no resonances or nodes.  Had the clock been operated conventionally, the
probability that noise would "fool" the logic, not unlike the way Gaussian
Noise can create logic inversion (noise fooling "1"s and "0"s into being
written in reverse) is far greater. It also has the effect of 'cleaner' analog
output in tube preamp connected to the 32bit DAC. Spectrum Spreading
was designed to avoid detection of radio locations during WWII. It is
employed in almost all High End computers today to lessen interference
with nearby, ancillary equipment.
"While You Were Away..."
Hidden processes keep music ON the memory and everything else OFF
CD microgram of "pits" & "lands".
Many of the smaller areas are
Error Correction bits.

Movie star Heddy Lamar and her
husband, George Antheil, designed
Spectrum Spreading for the
United States during WW II.

Designed to help US ships and
submarines avoid radio detection,
unfortunately it was not completed
until 1946.

Still, they were awarded a US Patent
for the design, which may very well be
in the computer you are reading this on!
Below:

A spectrum analyzer image of the
memory after just one CD was played.
Different colors indicate file types  left
on the memory. Please see the
Technical Guide for details.
Above:

The influx of music data initializes
memory scrubbing and partial
fragmentation exists during the
extraction period as the reader adds
bits and searches for dropped bits via
RUR (tm) .
Above and Below:

Scrubbed, nearly DLL-free and
fragment-free music data on the
memory is played sequentially with no
jitter creating legacy bits or computer
files to interrupt bit flow during playback
 
  YELLOW  Music Files
   TURQUOISE  DLLs
   BLUE  Corrupted Memory Area
   RED  Defragmented Files
   VIOLET  System Files
   WHITE  Vacant Memory Area
"Good enough for music".
* This is explained in depth in the      
" Technical Guide ".