THE LADS AND LASSES at nikkei.net have an interesting wee story about a breed of music players that offer far better quality than your average IC based gizmo.
The article said Sanyo and other manufacturers are rapidly moving into producing linear pulse code modulation (PCM) players. They apparently have the advantage that the technology does not compress data, with sampling frequencies of between 48 to 96KHz/sec and sampling bit rates are 16-24 bits.
They also are affordable, with prices under ¥50,000. There’s more here (subscription required). ♣
Mmm. Didn’t young Clive Sinclair sell a PCM amplifier back in the mid 1960s? Clever design, didn’t work.
The bit rate is samples per second × bits per sample × channels. If it’s rate is only 16-24 bits (per second needs to be added to make it a rate) then it will sound terrible if you can hear it at all, which you almost certainly can’t. If that’s what nikkei.net are saying, (I don’t have a subscription), then they’re idiots. They probably mean 16-24 bits per sample. If it’s stereo and 16 bit samples on each channel, that makes the minimum bit rate 1536Kb/s, which is better than CD quality. Choosing linear sampling is a little odd too, as thats older than the CD audio format (which uses it too) and is just wasting data compared to other options. Compression is not a disadvantage by the way if you use a lossless compression algorithm. Sounds to me like nikkei.net are helping to marchitect the sale of Sanyo.
Marchitect? :)
Schmarchitect? :)