Memory Player. The State of the Art in Digital Playback

Memory Player is the state of the art in digital playback. Memory Player has been engineered to convey the most analog-sounding presentation of any digital source, ever.

What is still so appealing about analog? I think it's around anticipation and the sense of music as a kind of story telling - the music is going somewhere, and all the little things musicians do in the playing, like shaping the dynamics and temper, is building up that momentum. Or the music is a kind of argument which moves towards a state of resolution. The point is we are going somewhere and, of course, if you have a fine turntable there isn't very much to get in the way of the nextness; it has an inexorability, one thing leads to another in a very seamless way. You know how vinyl kind of charges the room before any music has even played? It's that: anticipation, something is coming.

In the early days of digital CDs were mastered from analog recordings but a bit later on studios went to recording and mastering using 16 bit without dither. So I think this is where digital gets its reputation for poor quality. The quantization distortion was terrible. Dithering came along, which helped, and then 24 bit which really did away with the issue of quantization noise. But, thousands of recordings had been released and some of those recordings are of our treasured musicians performing treasured sessions.

Memory Player was really engineered to create the space, environment and time to look at how digital evils manifested and address them before we go to the dac.

There is no other player that employs the techniques used in Memory Player to deal with random jitter, introduced at the operating system level, or even embedded in the audio codes themselves that, as far as the dac is concerned, are indistinguishable from the audio stream itself.

I have gone into this problem of timing in digital audio at a depth that has never been attempted, creating proprietary technologies like The Clock Mapper, De-Fractionalized Memory, IDEAS/IDEAS2 to optimize the audio source material before we even think about heading to the output.

The Clock Mapper dedicates clock time to audio, removing the demands of competing processes thereby avoiding the 'interrupt' that is a common feature of the CPU clock. By enabling the audio to enjoy an exclusive, isolated clock with all of the threads directed only to that clock, you will virtually negate the interference from non-audio processes.

DeFractionalized Memory©, by virtue of its patented structure, will reduce jitter on any file placed on it, by a factor of 16. It creates a ‘virtual clock’ that utilizes only one in 16 clock ticks thereby improving the accuracy of the clock, virtually, by a minimum of 6%, and as much as 94%.

IDEAS (Impulse Discharge of Events in Atemporal Space) reduces all forms of jitter, but is unique in its ability to access Random (Stream) Jitter. IDEAS first deletes zeroes irrelevant to the audio signal. It then rearranges the data to be sequential, rather than the ordering imposed by the storage subsytem which is not original, but designed for faster searches, and relocates it away from any system files or processes that could interfere.

Memory Player has been engineered to preserve the things digital does well - dynamic range for example, and its low noise floor. But to give us back our nextness,our sense of uninterrupted musical progression.

In addition to the anti-distortion technologies that are built in Memory Player can be further improved by installing the  modules:

DAC Power Supply and Virtual Battery. Speak to us if you are interested in these enhancements.

Mark Porzilli

The Designer at the Designer's Desk