Isolation/coupling: basics?

So if you knew it were to vibrate and you knew of a way to direct the vibration away from its own self would you be inclined to dampen the initial vibrating device?...Tom

Vibration is bad, except in loudspeaker cones. Isolation and coupling are good. But at some point, the law of diminishing returns sets in. My equipment does not require the extreem measures which some other folk find necessary.

My 2 cents

1) I have observed that CD's copied at a higher speed are less reliable. I attribute this to the shorter amount of time the laser has to burn the pit into the substrate.

2) Much is made of the error correction affecting the sound in CD players. Unless your CDs are pretty beat up, I would guess the error correction is used far less than you think.

My first CD player was a McIntosh MCD7000 (mid 1980's). It had an indicator on the front that would light up EVERY TIME the player was interpolating data (correcting for an unreadable error). Even with that early transport (high speed transports for computers hadn't yet been invented) the light ALMOST NEVER came on. Maybe once every few CD's.

I attribute the differences in CD player sound to other issues, such as D/A's, analog output stages and jitter (another issue altogether - not related to error correction).

Johnmcelfresh...Right on!

Sometime before I made quite a lot of searches in internet about DAE issues. My observations show that even the most modern CD players/drives have a lot to do with data reading errors, and it very varies from drive to drive. And that normally CD players (it's actually their firmware) don't check data integrity as good as CDROMs do, which, however, have got improved with the years. The reason of why that indication almost never came on might be a 'weak' criteria when interpolation is really required. While interpolation methods also got improved, on 16/44.1 they still may not be refined enough comparing to the 'original' (otherwise all transports would sound the same). You can't get the 'original' when playing CD in CDROM either. So, it seems that the only way to get the 'original' is proper DAE onto hard drive that doesn't have reading issues, and then playing it from there., which is another story with other issues.