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CD Read Errors--Rare?

In the latest issue of The Absolute Sound on p. 131, Robert Harley claims that errors in a CD player's bit stream are rare. His argument is that an error in the first bit in the sample would throw the amplitude off by half, resulting in "a very loud click." Since we don't hear loud clicks during playback, there must not be many first bit errors, which means there must not be many error at all.

Here is my question: Since the sample is only 1/44,100 of a second long, and speaker diaphrams do not react instantaneously to signal changes, would the "click" end up being inaudible?
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Showing 1 response by kthomas

kthomas
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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.
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