Why EAC (or cdparanoia or a whole slew of rippers) get more accurate readings is because though there is error correction on CD's, it is not always able to correct every error. It is possible that enough bits are off that there is insufficent correction code to fix them (or the ECC bits got corrupted by the same errors).
This is called "Uncorrectable Data Error" because that is exactly what it is. To make matters more interesting, not all CD-ROM drives report when this happens. CDP's will know when this happens and have a variety of mechanisms to fudge the data so you ideally won't notice. EAC gets around this lack of information from the hardware by rereading the sector and comparing on drives that don't report failures. This is why EAC is a lot faster on drives that do report uncorrectable errors and why if you have a 48x drive, you still usually end up ripping at 4x or so. So, yes, EAC is quite capable of reading a disc that a conventional CDP player will either refuse to play (some just stop playing if they get to a particularly nasty spot), or that will fudge data just to make it sound better. It's not unique to EAC: cdparanoia does much the same thing on Unix platforms and I'm sure there are plenty of other programs that don't blindly trust the drive to fix every error. -- snarlydwarf ------------------------------------------------------------------------ snarlydwarf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1179 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24957 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
