dpierce wrote ...
Richard Crowley wrote:
To my way of thinking DAT and MO were formats/media
were *designed* to be recovered digitally whereas audio
CD (as contrasted with CD-ROM) was never designed to
be used to reproduce the exact digital sample stream. The
minimalist error detection/recovery methodology used in
the RedBook format would appear to support this theory.

Which "minimalist error detection/recovery methodology" would
that be. Red bnook audio CD's use several rather sophisticated
error encoding/detection and recovery algorithms, including EFM
encoding, CIRC (Cross-Interleaved Reed-SOlomon Coding), etc..

Typically, the raw bit error rate on a CD is on the order of 1
bit in 10^5 or 10^6, but after CIRC error correction, this is
reduced to 1 bit in 10^11 or less. I have routinely seen discs
play the entire way through without a single uncorrected error.

I meant relative to data-grade error detection/recovery schemes.

If it is that common to be able to read RedBook data stream
without errors, why do people have so much trouble ripping
them? Even pristine discs right out of the shrink-wrap.