Perhaps the Mark 3 will have a build in CD transport and a built in emplode. ;) You'd want to set it into WAV rip mode... ;) and have it play as it rips?

You can argue forever as to what constitutes a "copy" for example, if the judge puts a iasca cd in an ordinary CD player.... when the laser strikes the cd surface and bounces back... does the laser contain A COPY of the information on the cd? So to that effect, what you're playing is not the cd, but a copy of the cd off of a beam of light. The beam of light is converted into digital electrical signals. Is this stream of digital electrical pulses not a COPY of the beam of light's pulses? And by this point the data may or may not be exactly the same due to any number of events, quantum physics or jitter or whatever. And as this copy of the software goes through the dac, is it not an altered version of the digital software? And the amplifer and who knows what other devices in the output path all do some sort of modification, that by the time it comes out of the speakers (which has their own colorizations) what you are hearing is a copy of a copy of a copy many times over.

So if the empeg was made to rip a CD in real time (not necessarily encode as an mp3) but rip it and play it in real time.... wouldn't this qualify according to the rules? Because what is the philosophical difference between having a copy of the software travel through a car audio system and out of the speakers in a few milliseconds versus traveling through an empeg-car audio system and having some of the bits lag a little (e.g. "lag" into the hard drive, and from the hard drive to the speakers) in also a few milliseconds?

If you can argue that the hard drive is equivalent to a cross over, or a speaker, or an amplifier, or a dsp, which it is, then you would qualify right?

It seems to me that if IASCA qualifies many of these audio components present in the "stream" -- what is wrong with a single component that integrates many of these audio components into a single box? And if some of these components in this single box do not have car-audio counterparts (such as hard drive, ripper, empeg-car player) so what? All you have to do is argue that the music moves from cd player to point a to point b, point b to point c, point c to the speakers. The trick is of course, getting this to occur very quickly.

Calvin