Bits Are Bits, Right?

Greg
The Orchid took some burning in to warm up to my ears and a change of IC but now, oh yes it's good, nay it's very good.
And I just have stock tube in it as awaiting arrival of the WE tube.

It's in my main rig where it contends with a record rig at least 4 times cost.

In my second system I just use a $50 Google Chromecast Audio puck that produces amazing SQ for what it is.

Imagine what $50 of total record replay equipment would look and sound like....

Uberwaltz - you’re right. I’m not being fair to the media. I personally believe that a computer has the greatest potential to sound best of all the mediums, however, computers are notoriously noisy environments and very few computer parts are built with maximizing audio quality in mind. A CD player is a type of computer, albeit one that sounds better, dollar for dollar, than what we typical call computers because they are simpler in nature and purposely built to sound good. Note that I said “potential,” and not “in practice.”

"Bits are bits and as long as the CD player can read them

Not really, the error correction is a constantly working part, if the error correction is working hard and guesses whether to throw a 0 or a 1 into the bits it can’t read, it’s got a 50% chance of getting it right, because it always subs the one it can’t read with whatever came before it.

Here are three closeups of an of the shelf "retail CD" (left) and a "burnt one" (middle) and a "re-writable one" (right)
Which do you think is going to give the more errors.
https://ibb.co/5nXB6bC

Same happens with streaming and with H/D stored stuff, there are always read errors to be substituted

Cheers George

Mkgus
Agreed on computer being noisy for audio playback, one reason never really used just a computer.
I use a dedicated streamer whose sole purpose in life is to stream hires music from either an online streaming service or an attached hard drive of some description.

You will likely find that’s the way majority do it who are looking for top flight SQ.

Btw my comment was not necessarily aimed at yourself, just in general.

I hate to tread into the waters, and certainly dont want to design and teach the long class necessary to get to all this, so a few simple comments will do:
1. There are no bits on a CD. repeat after me "eight to fourteen modulation"2. A digital signal, primarily SPDIF which is source cloaked is a half-analog signal, with the amplitude digitized and the X-axis (timing) analog.3. Clock recovery or buffering/readout is impacted by many things including originating jitter and various types of noise4. That said, really good modern DACs using USB (asynch) reduce many of these problems by vast percentages.
Neither the hogwarts school of audio nor the "its all simple and really well understood" school (wrong twice!) are even close to right.
In general quit worrying about rippign speeds and CD media and get good files, on anything, transfer them over a DAC-clocked interface, galvanically isolated, and move along.
For the record i can get remarkable sounds from 320-384 kbps CBR MP3.  OK, FLAC is better, but not much.  HD - the jury is out, clearly good in the studio. I wonder if what  hear is simple better master transfer when the jury is occasionally in, to cripple a metaphor.
G