2y ago

How is it possible that a laptop can read a CD flawlessly, but every other device I've tried the CD on skips at certain parts?

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?

9 comments

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.
- 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
  
  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.
  
  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.
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/
- Yea Exact Audio Copy in secure mode will re-read each sector double-checking results until it has a consistent perfect rip. It takes a little while longer, but the results are worth it.
  
  I borrowed the entire CD collections of a few friends to do this a while back. It took so long but it was probably worth jt. The worst part is when you forget about it and it sits idle for days before you remember and swap to the next disc.
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.

9 comments