CD Read Errors--Rare?

I don't remember if it was the latest TAS, but I recall Robert Hartley talking about potential CD read errors, and stating that they should be rare. I think the reasoning was much deeper than that we would hear clicks if there were read errors. There was a discussion of the error correction encoding and he detailed how many consecutive bits would have to be misread and/or unable to be read, to generate a genuine read error.

Reading off a CD for playback should be basically error free. Reading off a hard drive or out of RAM would be literally effor free. It just seems that the handling of digital files in the digital domain is a solved problem.

Hartley's claim was that even though the sample is only 1/44100 of a second long, if the error occurred at a point where there was a major shift in the sound (my words) it would be translated as a click. The click would be audible. If that is the case, the question would be ... how often do your hear clicks on CD playback? I can't remember hearing even one anytime in recent memory.

Regards, Rich

It depends. There are a lot of effects going on. Nerve bundles in the ear fire slowly - less than 4 Khz. So one individual error may or may not be audible depending on when it occurred. Of course many errors would audible.

The error correcting code used for CD data is not a band-aid for the occasional read error. It is an essential part of the data storage and retrieval process. It permits the system to be operated at a much higher bandwidth than the hardware could manage if read errors could not be allowed to occur. Read errors are frequent, but a group of errors extensive enough to get through the error correcting code is rare.