Is analog & vinyl anoying? Is it worht it.

Eldartford,

Actually I just answered my own question on the last post. So I thought I would share it.

Cross-Interleaved Reed Solomon Coding

It states

INTERPOLATION: If a major error occurs and a sample cannot be perfectly reconstructed by the error control circuitry, it is possible to "guess" the content of the sample; that is, obtain an approximation by interpolating it off the neighbouring audio samples. While this concealment will not "fix" the error, it will make it inaudible, offering a graceful degradation of audio quality as clicks and pops are avoided.

A corroded CD with errors from additional random pits over the surface would be a candidate for "interpolation" - as the data will be consistently affected rather than in "error bursts". (Corrosion being a very different situation from a scratch, dirt or thumb print on the surface)

I suspect my rotten CD was being interpolated in regions where data was bad for more than 2.4 mm.

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Now back to the Shine-Ola comments. Armed with the above informaton from Wikipedia it seems that Shine-Ola could cause an audible improvement if the CD surface was dirty enough to cause interpolation but not cause skipping. This situation would mean that the CD would sound OK to the listener (no skipping) but would still benefit from being cleaned because there was excessive interpolation going on (excessive interpolation would definitely be audible, at least I can hear on a CD with CD Rot)

However, cleaning is cleaning and there is no reason to suspect that Shine-Ola offers the only effective way to clean a CD.

BTW: I don't handle my CD's much, as I only ever feed them into the machine once and they stay there. So I may not need to clean my CD's - but others might benefit from keeping them clean.

Shadorne...Yes, interpolation is a fall-back method which is just an alternative to aborting. The R/S algorithm used for CDs will only fail for very severe damage. It is not intended that interpolation should occur for any significant length of time.

The "robustness" of the RS algorithm (how much bad/lost data it can recover) is chosen according to how noisy the data is expected to be. For a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, and sending back pictures, corruption or total loss of data for more than a minute is fully correctable. The downsode is that a great deal of redundancy is in the data stream so it takes many minutes to transmit a picture that you might download to your computer in a few seconds.

Tvad,

I don't question your observation but it begs the question why shouldn't a brand new CD play properly from the get go?

Did you try other CDR's - like the clear silver ones that look more like regular CD's ( at least superficially)

I found out what system (see my post above) the store I visited was . Here it is:

Technics SL1200 Turntable
Ortofon Pro S Cartridge w/ OM 30 Stylus
NAD 1155 Power Envelope
ADS L70 Speakers

No wonder. In the other thread, majority votes has said the Technics SL1200 is said to be good value TT.