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The important thing here is that it shouldn't really change the operator's daily routine, and the disks for the movie being shown "should" still be in the machine. The purpose of having the hard disk is threefold: first, to ensure that the film will play in DTS even if it is (for example) doubled up with another DTS feature and the operator neglects to change the disks; second, to help to increase the lifespan of the CD-ROM drives by reducing the wear and tear on their mechanical components (by playing the sound from the hard disk whenever possible, rather than from the CDs); and, third, to allow for situations where the disks may not be available (for example, interlocking one print in multiple DTS-equipped auditoria or for theatres that may get two prints of one title, but only have one set of disks).

I agree that SCSI is far preferable to IDE, and it's probably not worth moving to IDE for the CD drives. SCSI drives are generally of higher quality, anyway, and can be more easily interchanged than different makes/models of IDE drives. The real bottleneck, though, is the speed at which the CD-ROM drive is capable of reading the data off the disks, and even the cheapeast hard disk has a far higher throughput rate than the fastest CD-ROM drive in general use.

In theory, the software change should be pretty simple, and, even with a good markup for DTS, shouldn't add more than, say, $500 to the cost of the unit.

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Imagine being able to load a "Feature Presentation" snipe one time and have it play back on your unit every single time. The same could go for trailers that don't make it to the trailer disc. This could seriously diminish "sound on film" argument commonly made against the format.

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The application that comes to mind is having one disc for each feature instead of two, and using no compression at all.

Not that the current DTS system is lacking - not at all! It sounds incredible, but uncompressed could sound even better...what do you think?

DTS, under normal circumstances, will not even play unless the serial number of the print (I assume that is embedded in the time code) and the serial number of the disc match. Unless both of the 'A' discs had some of the same trailers, which would probably cause something funny to occur...

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It would save $$$ if dts could just send out one copy of the "trailer disc" every week and just have everyone load it to their hard drive as well.

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"DTS, under normal circumstances, will not even play unless the serial number of the print (I assume that is embedded in the time code) and the serial number of the disc match. Unless both of the 'A' discs had some of the same trailers, which would probably cause something funny to occur."

Hmmmm. I am not so sure of that. We have had bad disks in the past, and a replacement disk worked just fine.

And, it would be very interesting to see how an IDE hard drive would react when sorting out the codes for a specific movie and play the correct track. Personally, I think go over like a cast iron tennis ball.

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All you have to do is change the discs and cycle the power. That's pretty simple. You won't see any more CD-ROM drives added to units. You may, however, see a hard drive in the not too distant future.