[Paranoia] Audio data varies from drive to drive?

[xiphmont at xiph.org]

Hello,

first off, all of Paolo's suggestions and questions are good ones.

One additional point...

Audio CDs do not have all the layers of error correction that data CDs
do, and it's not unusual for the error rate of a brand new commercial
pressing to be high enough that some errors are getting through all
the layers of protection.  It's not the common case, but it happens.
Also any disc with 'copy protection' is going to be intentionally full
of errors.

Once you have actual hard errors that are getting through the
correction, different drives behave differently.  Some try to
interpolate across the bad data according the the published redbook
spec, some use 'enhanced' techniques, some do nothing.

cdparanoia, as yet, doesn't try to watch the error flag information
because until recently it hasn't been a reliably supported feature
(and it's still the case that many drives that 'support' returning
error flags are not reliable about it.)  But it's on the feature list
for the future.

Monty