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10
Special Design Features
Congratulations on your purchase of the Nº30.6 Reference Digital Audio Processor.
The Madrigal design team is confident you will enjoy the outstanding perfor-
mance of the Nº30.6 for many years. In case you are interested in technical de-
tails, what follows is a brief outline of some of the key technologies in your new
processor.
Powerful DSP Capabilities
Your Nº30.6 employs four powerful SHARC
®
digital signal processors to deliver
exceptional flexibility and versatility. Together, they form a single DSP “engine” that
can handle the myriad of processing duties required in today’s rapidly-changing
world of digital audio. These duties include decoding HDCD
™
and “24/96” de-
coding, and may be expanded to include many other signal formats over time.
“24/96” capability & HDCD
®
In addition to the common 16 bit at either 44.1 and 48 kHz sampling rates used
by digital sources such as CD and DAT, your Nº30.6 also supports the two chan-
nel 24-bit/96 kHz signal that was defined as part of the DVD-Video standard
(and which will certainly be included as part of a larger DVD-Audio standard
when the industry agrees to such a thing). As of the writing of this manual, such
“24/96” material is just beginning to become available, and we expect availability
to grow quickly over time.
In addition to true 24-bit capability, the Nº30.6 also incorporates High Definition
Compatible Digital
®
decoding to take full advantage of the increased resolution
available from HDCD-encoded 16-bit CDs. The High Definition Compatible Digi-
tal
®
format retains much of the resolution inherent in professional twenty bit re-
cordings, by encoding this information more efficiently within the sixteen bit
space available within the Compact Disc format.
An Intelligent FIFO™
Unlike previous processors which were highly dependent on the quality of the
digital signal they were fed, the Nº30.6 Reference Digital Audio Processor delivers
outstanding performance with even less-than-ideal digital signals.
“FIFO” stands for “First In, First Out.” It describes a simple buffer in which the
digital information is stored temporarily on its way to being converted to analog.
Just as a large water tower can provide a steady source of water to a small town,
despite hour-to-hour variations in the supply of water from the well, a FIFO can
provide a steady, consistent source of digital data to the converters which are re-
sponsible for changing that data into music. Even if there is significant “jitter” (in-
consistencies in timing) in the incoming digital information, the output of the
FIFO is controlled by a special clock with tremendous accuracy. The result largely
eliminates the jitter and allows the musical information to be reproduced cleanly,
without jitter-induced distortions.
The trouble with most FIFOs lies in their behavior when the incoming signal is
poor enough to cause the “water tank” to overflow or to be emptied. Normally, a
FIFO would then have to “invent” false data to fill the gap, throw away excess
data, or revert to non-FIFO operation. None of these approaches are acceptable.
Of course, you could simply use an
extremely
large buffer. Unfortunately, this so-
lution is a poor one.