In yesterday's post I wrote about the state of digital audio back in the early 1990s. At that early stage in the technology's development, no one was jumping up and down about superior sound quality to analog. In fact, any digital product even approaching a pale semblance to analog was hailed as a miracle wrought by wizards.
There weren't many miracles or wizards.
While others were focused on perfecting the output stage of the D to A converter, I became enamored with the idea of starting at the very beginning. How much did the bits themselves matter? The popular notion of the time is that one of the beauties of digital was that bits are bits. As long as you got the 1s and the 0s in the right place, not much else would matter.
Oh, the hubris.
One of the clues that got me headed down the "quality of bits might matter" rabbit hole was a curious CD transport we owned at Genesis. Our good friend and fellow audiophile crazy, a New York based importer of audio equipment by the name of Victor Goldstein, had been haranguing Arnie and me about the wonders of a very pricey French transport from a company we knew primarily for its vacuum tube products. Jadis.
The Jadis JD-1 transport was a beautiful beast—a sculpted metal temple of gold and black that housed a decent top loading transport from Philips. Victor was so excited about this new transport that he just shipped us one on loan, certain we would buy it as our new reference in the Genesis listening room. He was not wrong.
Incredibly (remember, this was back in the early 90s when only DACs mattered to sound quality), CDs played on this transport were remarkably better than those same CDs played on any other transport we had on hand. And not by just a little bit.
WTF?
Same bits. Completely different performance. How was that possible? What sorcery was at play here?
I lay awake at night going over the possibilities and always, I came back to the same conclusion. Something in those bits had to be different (a better conclusion than the world was turning upside down).
One Saturday morning I left the house early and headed into work determined to discover what could be different. After hours on the bench armed with nothing more than my trusty capture scope to grab hold of those "identical" bits I began to notice something unusual.
To be continued…
