this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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I've had this CD for ages. Decades. It would always skip at a certain parts on two of its tracks. I've never in my life heard the full CD because of this reason, always having to skip forward to the next track.

I've listened to it on at least four different devices, among them a very large Sony home stereo system. I've always thought the CD was faulty.

But today, I ripped the CD on a cheap old laptop and guess what. For the first time in my life I heard the whole uninterrupted tracks. What is this sorcery? Can someone explain?

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[–] sizzler@lemmy.world 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Cd drives in computers are more technical than standard stereo players due to their nature of writing to cds. Think higher quality, more accurate equipment.

Edit to add: I remember this was an issue Sony faced, it was selling higher quality dvd players in its PlayStation 2 cheaper than its standalone dvd player series.

[–] Mothra@mander.xyz 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

So... It is actually a faulty cd by general standards, especially the time of its release as I don't think laptops were that popular, and one with a CD reader would have been an expensive rarity.

I'm still perplexed though

[–] sizzler@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes bad cd, just the laptop cd drive can read with greater error checking (parity?) to achieve skip free playing.

It's scary how much is clipped away from music with compression and poor playback equipment. Sometimes the right setup really changes the song.

[–] vxx@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The issue with CDs isn't the compression, since music in CDs isn't compressed.

CDs are getting read at a rate of 44000 times a second. Sometimes this frequency will cancel out the Digital information on the CD under circumstances that can't be stopped. The better the correction of this naturally occurring error, the more natural the CD sounds.

That's a pretty bad explanation, but that's the main reason CDs can sound way different to LPs.

[–] ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I don't really know. I suspect they might have error correction codes of differing sophistication. Even if that's not right here is a cool video on Hamming codes anyway.

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

My theory, which has been pulled from my ass, is that the CD player just wants to play each second of music as it reads it. If it has a problem, it skips it and moves on (or repeats that moment forever until you skip to the next track).

The computer was trying to put the entire track on the blank CD, and in order to do that, it was willing to try a little harder to piece it together.

[–] neonred@lemmy.world -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Why has been explained below, different drives have different capabilities regarding read buffer, error correction, etc.

There are (were) very large comparison sheets and articles where different drives and manufacturers have been compared with each other.

I chose my external USB CD-drive on the premise I could flash custom firmware to it so to keep the option of new features and enhances functionality, in case someone would do this. Like how OpenWRT came to be.

If you want to enhance the ripping quality or consistency even more you can try the program "Exact Audio Copy" (EAC) or any other sophisticated CD grabber software. It is already around for aaages, that should give you an idea how tricked out specialized software was already decades ago.

https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/overview/features/features-of-eac/