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Differences with CD ripping speeds audio folklore?

I have often wondered why people claim that lower CD ripping speeds produce a higher quality resulting WAV file. After all, wouldn`t people avoid using CD-ROM`s that routinely produce errors? Computer data demands high accuracy, or else programs may not work correctly or data may be inaccurate. In addition, CD`s are encoded with redundant data that allows the drives to automatically correct many errors, and detect those that it cannot correct. So why should reading an audio CD be any different?

So I conducted a test this morning. I used one of my old machines which had an older CD ripping program that allowed me to choose the speed of the rip. I chose 1x. On my newer machine, I used MusicMatch Jukebox to rip it, which averaged at about 25X. I transferred all the files over to my Unix machine and did a bitwise comparison on them. As expected, they are IDENTICAL.

So could the theory that lower CD ripping speeds sounding better be yet another example of audio folklore?

Michael
128x128Ag insider logo xs@2xsufentanil
cwlondon
1,210 posts
 
That does not surprise me, provided you are using a CD which is in very good condition and decent equipment.

Add some dust, scratches or mechanical difficulties and I am not sure that the 25x file would be identical.

But I am just guessing and may be totally wrong. After all, I am an audiophile so I like tweaky folklore.
audphile1's avatar
audphile1
5,281 posts
 
Sufentanil, how about this - is the copy and original identical?
sufentanil's avatar
Ag insider logo xs@2x
sufentanil OP
782 posts
 
I can't comment on whether the copy or the original are identical because the usual way of assessing the original CD data is to extract it onto a hard drive.

Since two different drives produced bit-identical results, I can say with a high probability that the copies also match the original.

CD's have encoded ways of detecting and correcting data errors, and for detecting when the errors are too extensive to be corrected. So if there is considerable disc damage, shouldn't there be an error message?

Michael
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