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On 10/2/20 9:53 AM, 'M' [email protected] [EAC] wrote:
> Sometimes I have discs that are very scratched and it would be
> nice to have a quick confirmation if the disc will read properly
I suppose you could read in Burst Mode (no attempt at any error
detection or correction) just to see what happens. You'd get very fast
results, but you still wouldn't get a definitive answer as to whether
it's possible to accurately read the disc via more advanced methods.
> I also seem to be much less concerned with the results than what
> I am reading about here the last few days.
It's an obsession for me because I'm a huge music fan and used to trade
live discs long ago. I soon learned that many (most?) people just don't
care about getting it right and I wound up getting a lot of stuff in
trade that was either slightly bad or completely unlistenable.
Ultimately I gave up because I'd spend lots of time trying to get what
I'd send out perfect only to get garbage (pretty much literally!) in
return. I used to trade a lot of quadraphonic material via DTS CDs and
those are very, very, /very/ sensitive to /any/ errors, so getting it
right was absolutely mandatory.
By a few years later I wound up with so many CDs that I couldn't even
properly organize them any more, so I decided to put everything online
where at least I could find and listen to things without having to think
about where the disc might be. It was a huge process that took me a year
and a half (I was still working full-time, retirement was almost a
decade in the future) and I strongly felt that there was no point in
doing something that massive at all unless I did it as close to 100%
right as I could.
One thing that I don't think gets talked about much (maybe because it's
not really A Thing?) is that a lossless file theoretically has the
potential to be more acccurate and possibly even sound better than
listening to a spinning optical disc. If you've got a file that's
AccurateRip verified coming off a hard drive with lots of inherent error
correction coming over Ethernet into a bit-perfect player, you've
eliminated quite a bit of potential points of failure.
Having said that, I'm sure that 99% of the time the difference isn't
audible. But I'm sure that any of us who've done a lot of this have
encountered CDs that had issues in a CD player but read fine in a
computer. Or vice versa. Or discs that played fine in one machine but
not another. Or discs that ripped perfectly in one computer drive but
not another, etc.
I just operate under the assumption that known good FLAC files are going
to give me the best possible sound out of all the available options.
Pointless anecdote: I once found a pressed Marc Almond CD in a record
store. There was one point on the disc that caused every single player
to skip, despite the lack of any visible damage. Drove me crazy. Initial
attempts to copy it into the computer were also unsuccessful until one
day I tried again with a Plextor drive (that tells you how long ago it
was!). It finally copied successfully and all these years later I can no
longer remember exactly where the skip was!
I suspect, based entirely on a combination of superstition and the
voices in my head, that we probably get playback errors far more often
than we realize but playing from hard drive eliminates that possibility.