Now that my dts player is fully repaired I really understand what do you
mean with "dts reliability".
However I wonder why dts techs doesn't improve their players with few,
simple enanchements:
1. Add a "motor start" feature. This would provide:
a. CD rom drives spinned only when needded.
b. Readers LED lighted on only when film is projected: this could be
useless in a platter installaion but is important in a changeover (auto rewind)system.
2. A better management of timecode/cdrom problems:
a. Do not allow too fast kick in DTS/SR that sometimes can cause the CP to
stay in DTS when should stay in SR.
b. Do not allow frequent change digital/analog: that would indicate a
timecode/cdrom problem. Like Dolby, players should wait few seconds after a
multiple droputs before going in digital.
3. A timecode "strenght" level indicator like old LED in very old readers.
I read that you suggested an Hard Disk.
Any other suggestions?
Bye
Antonio
But some machines just have trouble. I remember Rich Petersen telling me about the repeated problems he had with dying Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM drives in one of the two DTS machines he had at Dallas' Casa Linda 4 theater.
My friend Jack has 5 DTS-6D players and two original 2-drive DTS-6 machines. One of the DTS-6D machines has some kind of problem in that drive A just will not work. He uses drives B and C for playing movie audio on that machine. His 2-drive DTS-6D players have been running since late 1994 without a hitch.
I can think of plenty of suggestions for DTS to use in a next generation machine, and gave those suggestions years ago. A WinNT or Linux server computer controlling a juke box of DVD-ROM drives would be great. With a Firewire controller, up to 68 devices can be daisychained to one computer. That is more than enough device capability for an entire multiplex. Simple network feeds to each booth rack will have everything going. Discs all stay in the same centralized place. A whole multiplex gets multichannel digital sound for a fraction of what it would cost to outfit DTS-6Ds or DTS-6ADs at every booth rack. Certainly there would be some technical hurdles with such a system, the chief hurdle being what to do about backup redundancy. As cheap as motherboards and other computer parts have become, it should be no big deal at all to have a "backup sever" built into the unit in case the main board fails. If I remember right, grouping multiple servers together is called clustering. But it has to be implemented in a simple enough fashion that the cluster doesn't turn into a clusterf**k. Hehe.
So I'm very lucky if one of my two Toshiba 1994 drives has failed!!
Bye
A