Proceed PDSD - Manual (Page 14)

14
Special Design Features
Congratulations on your purchase of the Proceed Digital Surround Decoder
(PDSD). We have gone to great lengths to ensure that the PDSD remains
“future-proof” even in these times of change. As a result, you will be able to en-
joy the outstanding performance of the Digital Surround Decoder for many years.
In case you are interested in technical details, what follows is a brief outline of
some of the key technologies in your new product.
hardware upgradable The Digital Surround Decoder employs a ten slot backplane configuration. This
means that various combinations of up to ten “cards” can be inserted into the
back of the unit, and that they will all communicate with each other as needed
without having to install jumpers or deal with point-to-point wiring. In fact, the
Digital Surround Decoder is in many respects more “plug and play” than many
computers that lay claim to the name.
The modularity of the Digital Surround Decoder ensures that the product can
easily accommodate changes in the future that might require new hardware. For
example, if the industry were to establish a new standard for digital interconnec-
tion, using a different physical connector, most products would be obsolete over-
night; with the PDSD, you would merely slide a new module into a slot.
Mind you, we do not believe that you will have to change hardware anytime
soon. We even went to the trouble of designing our own high bandwidth, pro-
grammable DIR (Digital Interface Receiver), the circuitry that actually receives a
digital signal and determine “which bits go where.” We did this to ensure that the
product you buy today can handle everything that a dedicated DVD-for-audio
disc may offer in the future. You see, conventional DIRs cannot handle the full 10
Mb/sec data rate of DVD… but ours can. Moreover, our DIR actually reclocks the
incoming digital signal to greatly reduce timing errors in the signal (jitter), mak-
ing every source you connect to the Digital Surround Decoder sound better than
it could otherwise.
software updatable All the software that the Digital Surround Decoder uses is stored in special
“flash” memory that can easily be updated as improvements are made available.
These improvements can affect both operational and performance enhancements.
For example, if a new, dedicated DVD-for-audio format is decided at some point,
it may well have 24-bit, 96 kHz sampling rate data on it as well as traditional 16
bit, 44.1 kHz data (for backwards compatibility). With a simple software down-
load a short time after such a standard is announced, your Digital Surround De-
coder would be able to both decode and play back the new audio standard, and
flip back and forth between the two versions of the music on the disc for com-
parison purposes.
The Digital Surround Decoder is designed to avoid the premature obsolescence
that will be the hallmark of far too many products sold in these changing times.
multichannel The Digital Surround Decoder is designed to be flexible with respect to its au-
dio configurations, as well. In its standard configuration, it provides the standard
5.1 channel selection of outputs made popular by home theater. However, it can