So really, all competitors should provide a line in or digital in, and the judge then hooks in his trusted equipment.

Problem is, different CD players will play the music differently. It all depends on what the design engineers had in mind when they spec'd out the DAC. This is why I am not happy with the idea of playing IASCA tracks through my portable CD player into the Aux In of the empeg. The sound is totally different -- the CD player is much warmer, mellower, less defined. It doesn't sound bad, mind you, but it kind of defeats all the time and work I spend tuning the empeg, and there would be no way I could tune in advance for a judge's CD player.

Is the idea of a checksum or digital signature so unworkable? Even the simplest possible checksum -- just count the total bytes in the file -- would be pretty hard to duplicate if the file were edited in any way. If the empeg could just display the file specs (size, creation date, modification date, etc.) that would be some indication that the file had not been altered. Yes, it would probably be possible to still manage to cheat (like rjlov's suggestion of spoofing the CD changer would be possible now) but it would keep the honest people honest; only the technically astute could cheat and chances are they would get caught anyway, because those judges are pretty sharp as a general rule -- they have heard that CD literally thousands of times in hundreds of different systems, they know exactly what it is supposed to sound like, and changes to the original would likely catch their attention. But then... how would they prove it?

C'mon people, think! There has to be some way of creating a tamper-proof file copy.

tanstaafl.




"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"