Theoretical question about how CD's work

IMO the reason many of the tweaks mentioned above by Geoff may be beneficial in some situations has nothing whatsoever to do with bit errors or error correction.

The main reason in most cases is likely to be related to electrical noise generated by the servo mechanisms and circuitry in the transport part of the player, as it tracks the disc, coupling into unrelated downstream circuitry in the player, causing jitter in the D/A conversion process, and/or intermodulation or other effects on the analog signal path. The degree to which that occurs will be dependent on the design of the particular player, of course, as well as on the condition of the disc.

From this Wikipedia writeup:

Reed-Solomon coding is a key component of the compact disc.... In the CD, two layers of Reed-Solomon coding separated by a 28-way convolutional interleaver yields a scheme called Cross-Interleaved Reed Solomon Coding (CIRC).... The result is a CIRC that can completely correct error bursts up to 4000 bits, or about 2.5 mm on the disc surface. This code is so strong that most CD playback errors are almost certainly caused by tracking errors that cause the laser to jump track, not by uncorrectable error bursts.

Note that the term "error correction," as properly defined in this context, refers to bit-perfect correction. "Error interpolation" is the term used to refer to the less than bit-perfect approximation that can occur (rarely) when bit-perfect correction fails.

And from a post by member Kirkus (who probably has more hands-on experience with the internal workings of CD players than the rest of us put together) in this Audiogon thread:

CD players, transports, and DACs are a menagerie of true mixed-signal design problems, and there are a lot of different noise sources living in close proximity with susceptible circuit nodes. One oft-overlooked source is crosstalk from the disc servomechanism into other parts of the machine . . . analog circuitry, S/PDIF transmitters, PLL clock, etc., which can be dependent on the condition of the disc.... One would be surprised at some of the nasty things that sometimes come up out of the noise floor when the focus and tracking servos suddenly have to work really hard to read the disc.

Apologies to the OP for the digression.

Regards,
-- Al
 

It’s a theoretical question as clearly stated and the answer is yes. That simple! Short and sweet.

Many audiophiles (largely vendors like Geoffkait) are even more long winded than all those politicians up on the debate stage trying to convince people to vote them in as President.

Almarg as an example though , and some others, are different. Al does not waste words on speculation...just the technical facts that can help further understanding of how things work in the right hands. He is also not a vendor. No $$s to be made in this game for him specifically TTBOMK.

As if words can accurately describe what something, pretty much anything, actually sounds like.  Theory and reality are not the same.

Sound technical facts help for sure but even those words alone can’t do it.

Disclaimer:: I too am NOT a vendor......no $$$s in this game for me.

So it's settled. The monkey on the player piano is the correct outcome.
🐒 + 🎹 = 🎼

here is a somewhat related comment...i'm sure that many of us played a CD in the car while driving...i bet it sounded fabulous...regardless of the laser scattering, the bumps in the road, and all the motion the car experiences during a normal drive...athat cheap CD player sounded pretty good...