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In Reply to: RE: A valid test for a CD player posted by KT88 on October 14, 2009 at 06:19:04
I would summarize the situation as follows. If you want to understand the QC issues related to disks and disk drives, then specialized knowledge and specialized tools are required. If you have audio on CDs that you don't want to lose then you must treat the disks with the greatest care. In addition, without backup copies you are still at risk.
There is no way to intuitively understand issues related to the quality of data recorded on a disk or the performance of a disk drive in dealing with data errors. In particular, that fact that a disk plays well on a variety of players today does not mean that it won't suddenly deteriorate overnight. Similarly, the fact that a drive can play a bunch of damaged disks well does not mean that it will continue to do so, nor that it will play other damaged disks. This area is best treated as a "logic free zone".
When I get a CD I rip it to my computer system using software that takes special care to get it right. It turns out that there are no problems with perhaps 95% of disks, but lately I've come across some old CDs that can't be read even though they have no scratches. This is the case on three separate computers, each with its own drive. Unfortunately, this music is lost for me, because I never made a copy. Most of the bad disks that I get come from disks that I am ripping for an Internet download service. When I get one that doesn't read properly it is usually because of scratches. About half the time these bad disks can be read on one of my three drives without any errors. At this point it is possible to burn a good CD-R copy. The drive that seems to do the best job on bad disks is old and slow. Perhaps it works well because it has seen very little use over its 10 year lifetime.
I don't like the idea of being captive to a CDP manufacturer for a working drive. I've been that route and had to junk an expensive player because of a defective laser that was uneconomical to repair. Drives wear out. The last time this happened on my audio PC it took me less than 15 minutes to install a new CD/DVD reader/burner which cost me less than $40.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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