I know this may sound really stupid, but I have an idea about how to stop CD’s from skipping. Instead of having a small point of laser light read one track at a time, why couldn’t they have a beam of laser light that would read the whole disc at once, then put that info into RAM memory? Then the hardware could simply scan the CD’s contents residing in memory and identify the skips beforehand, eliminating them automatically? I have a feeling that would take a lot of RAM memory, but could it work?
“No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.” - Alfred E. Smith
I shouldn’t attempt to answer this, but here goes. Better answers will follow, I suspect.
As far as reading the entire cd, assuming it could read at 50x, 1.5-2 minutes to read. Probably longer in real-world situation. This would be an annoyance to the user, probably require more expensive components/intelligence to handle the faster data stream, and suck up a lot more power running at this speed. You’d be changing batteries constantly.
You could have more than one laser, but I imagine that would be horribly problematic due to servo problems. You couldn’t just have a rack of fixed lasers… each one would need its own intelligence and ability to independantly position itself over data tracks. This would, I imagine, be even more expensive than a single laser reading at 50x.
Finally, CD players would need RAM, which isn’t cheap. CDs contain, I believe, about 640 megs of data. The audio tracks are basically wave files, which can’t be compressed that much. I’m getting 17% based on a quick experiment. So you’d need at least about 530 megs of ram. This would be several hundred dollars by itself.
A better option would be to have the cd player convert to MP3 format, which would only require about 64 megs of ram. And more intelligence, etc.
In any event, I guess the cheapest solution would be the 50x reader/MP3 converter. A WAG, based on prices of pure MP3 players, would mean a unit costing at least 300 bucks, have a very annoying wait period for the CD to be read/converted to MP3, and drain batteries at an alarming rate. Nobody would buy this just to alleviate the occasional skips.
Thinking about this more, you’d need a hell of a processor upgrade on this, AND a processor which would be small enough to fit inside a CD player.
My minimum 300 WAG is being very generous. There are probably a multitude of other problems I haven’t considered. I’m upping my minimum to 450
Portable CD players already have some memory that acts as a buffer to prevent skipping. Doesn’t that work well enough for you? Last time I shopped for a CD player most models had an 8-second buffer, and that was 2 years ago. I can’t remember the last time any of my CDs skipped, either on my car or on my portable. I suppose it can be a problem if you want to go running with one, in which case I’d suggest an MP3 player or the lowly tape (walkman).
Anyway, how would a system read a whole disk at once? Each disk has 640 MB of data, which is 5 billion bits. To take an image of a disk and extract all the data from it, you need a 5-billion pixel camera, which is 2 orders of magnitude larger than the best commercial digital cameras out there. You have to do some sort of scanning, and if you’re going to do that, you might as well read a few seconds (or minutes) ahead, it’ll be good enough.
The latest CD 'discman’s have about 40 second of anti-skip memory. At about 10 megs/minute, that’s like 8 megs of RAM in the player.
I have never heard anyone complain about thing skipping, and if id did skip enough to go past tha 40 seconds, not only would you drain your batteries to noghting, you’d basically have to playing hacky sack with the damned thing.
“My drinking team has a Rugby problem.” This sig line has been brought to you by the creative mind of Wally
I haven’t checked out the latest CD players. I own one that skips very often, an extremely annoying defect. Yeah, I guess a 40-second buffer would work a lot better than what I suggested above, and be cheaper too. I’d be willing to shell out a lot of money for a player that never skipped. I just have bad luck with the things, I guess.
“No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.” - Alfred E. Smith
The most resilient players available today are the ‘jogger’ models, supposedly designed to endure jarring for long periods without skipping. They typically also have a 40-second buffer. If you’re determined to get a non-skip player, look into one. Be warned that they tend to cost upwards of $100 more than a regular portable CD player, which means they start at around $150, and can cost as much as $300.
I’ve gotten a few anit skip models but within a year the anti skip tends to go. I got two CD players one at 15seconds and one at 45seconds of anti skip and after a year I can play all CDs perfectly without the anit skip but once the anti skip is on almost 90% of my CDs won’t play.
I’m looking into the portable mini CDs but can never figure out which one to get.
