[Paranoia] CD Ripping Uncertainty Principle?

[Nils Chr. Framstad]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Monty wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 12:04:05PM -0500, Alec Wood wrote:
> > At this point I have no idea how common this sort of thing is.  I've
> > only tested one CD (a commercial one) and it only has this one problem
> > area maybe a second long or so.  Maybe lots of CDs do this, maybe it's
> > quite rare. I have no idea.
>
> In the average mass produced audio CD, you generally have a
> substantial number of errors that get through the two layers of
> correcton used on an audio disc.  This is considered acceptible in the
> industry as they're usually not audible.

An (obviously) uneducated question from me, then: where does the
_randomness_ occur? Is it
 - the bits? E.g. the CD has bits with values so close to 1/2 that
Heisenberg, God and Kolmogorov (please delete as appropriate)
sometimes outputs 0, sometimes 1, for any reasonable CD-player?
 - the physics of the spinner? If software requests a re-read, and you
basically don't know where you bounce into the groove, you get
different sets of samples at each rip?
 - a combination?
 - something else?

What puzzles me also is that cdparanoia does not report the error. Is
it so that all those errors are re-read until they by coincidence pass
the error corrections, and then cdparanoia is satisfied and cannot
tell the difference between a correct sample and a erroneous which by
coincidence looks right on the nth read?

-- 
                                            mailto:ncf at math.uio.no
  "Terrorists believe that anything goes in the name of their cause.
   The fight against terror must not buy into that logic."
    -- Human Rights Watch: <URL:http://hrw.org/press/2002/01/wr2002.htm>