Why CD players will never be dead

"These are great questions. More audiophiles should ask these.”

Some of us are so overwhelmed by just the jargon that we don’t feel we can put our questions into words. My whole life, I thought I was pretty smart and could learn anything... until computers.

"When I look at the shelves of CDs it allows me to browse in a different way than any computer graphics can give me. I'm the sort of listener that seldom knows what I want to hear until I browse.”

That’s very understandable Irv. Why not just leave your CDs displayed as they are; then you can browse any way you want.

"I remember reading a review over at 6moons.com about how the reading of a disk and transfer to the DAC, in a CDP, is still an analog (mechanical) function or something to that effect. Its not really digital until the conversion.”

It can’t be called analog because the disc being read is digitally encoded. What would make sense to me is if 6moons compared the inherent irregularities of the mechanical function of a CDP to those of an analog playback system.

Nonoise, regardless of the details in the article, you’re right about the ripping process being bit-perfect while the transport read is not and is reliant on error correction.

" "Error correction," which as I understand it occurs many times during the reading of a typical cd, is by definition bit perfect, i.e., the error is corrected!”

Hi Al, please take this as a question and not an argument: If information (bits) is missing from a read, how does a CDP know what that information is. It was my understanding that error correction/interpolation/concealment is a process where the CDP makes a sort of guess based on the before and after the error bits. Okay Steve, blast away :-)

Thanks Al. Terrific explanation.