Proceed PMDT - Manual (Page 11)

11
Special Design Features
Modular hardware Perhaps the most obvious distinction of the PMDT is its card-cage design. With
seven slots on a powerful and flexible backplane, the PMDT represents an in-
vestment in avoiding premature obsolescence in state-of-the-art DVD play-
back. With the exception of the power supplies (there are four of them), all
important circuitry resides on these easily replaced cards.
These cards include the MPEG decoder and transport interface (immediately
adjacent to the transport loader); a component video output card; a composite
and S-Video output card; a digital audio output card; and the communications/
control card. This leaves two slots open for future expansion. After all, what
good does an “expandable” design such as this do if there is no room to ex-
pand?
Updatable software Less obvious, but every bit as important, is the degree of software modularity
built into the PMDT. We chose not to accept the standard DVD navigation
software that comes with a laser transport mechanism, with all its limitations
and confusion. Instead, we rewrote all of the software from an extremely low
level on up. While this was a huge undertaking, the benefits seemed more
than worth the effort: we would be able to address many of the failings found
in the typical DVD user experience, making the PMDT a pleasure to use; we
would also be able to incorporate new technologies more easily as they were
developed.
Thus, if standards evolve to the point that a new transport is required to read
new data formats on discs, we can swap out the necessary hardware, and
make some new “connections” between it and our own software. Rather than
having to start all over again, we can continue to use the infrastructure we
have developed, and our customers can continue to enjoy the benefits of what
we hope you’ll agree is a superior user experience. Just as important, movie
enthusiasts don’t have to throw away everything they own and start over -
something that cannot be said for products that do not have equivalent hard-
ware and software modularity.
No-compromise audio For DVD machines, audio is usually an afterthought. The usual assumption is
that people are buying DVD for the video quality and that the audio is good
enough. The result is that often little effort is put into optimizing DVD systems
for exceptional audio performance.
Madrigal’s roots and its reputation are inseparable from audio. The PMDT uses
techniques developed for Mark Levinson Reference products to ensure the
best possible recovery and transmission of digital audio signals. The PMDT is
a digital audio transport – it has no analog audio outputs. It is designed to
read DVD video discs (including 24-bit/96kHz music recordings on this for-
mat) as well as standard compact discs. The transport is compatible with
Dolby
® Digital and DTS ® . With hardware and software changes, the PMDT can
be reconfigured to read future DVD Audio discs.
Madrigal’s CLJR ™ (Closed Loop Jitter Reduction ™ ) system is employed to opti-
mize performance by minimizing jitter in the digital output, regardless of