Drive affect ripping quality?

[macbrush]

Some audiophile friends of mine claim that different CDROM drives yield results with subtle differences which only real audiophiles with excellent equipment can tell. I am not an audiophile really, I am just an computer guy, so I perform a test in a computer guy manner. I ripped a song into my computer using AIF format, 3 times on each drive, a Lite-on DVD-ROM Combo drive, and a TDK CDRW drive. Then perform a HASH on each file. I guess the result speaks the truth.

Sorry, had to cut/paste and crop the image for the 500 X 500 limit.

[brentsg]

Drives and software can certainly make a difference in rip qualty from an error correction standpoint. With a perfect disk this will be less important.

Also, stuff like read and write offset can make a difference as far as getting an exact disk copy and ripping the first and last songs properly.

Note that this stuff can happen, not that it necessarily will each time.

B

[macbrush]

I agree with you that drives make a difference with a bad CD though, my TDK CDRW reads a lot better (and quieter) than my LiteOn combo especailly those badly manufacturered CDs with lots of pinholes on them. My point is that with a good CD, the result would be exactly the same with no matter what drives (in good working order of course).

[pavoroyale]

I don't see how the CDROM can make any difference in the quality of the MP3 or AAC file created.

While it is true that high end cd players, are said to produce better sounding music, that is because the quality of equipment can effect the quality of the analog sound produced by the decoding of the digital file.

When you rip a CD to a compressed format, you aren't playing the file (converting from digital to analog back to a new digital file) or else the quality of your sound card, cd drive et all would have an effect... rather the ripping software is performing some math on the digital "cd music format" file to convert it to another digital format file.

Any degredation in quality (as there is with any lossy format) is from the quality of the math (the encoding codec, bit rate, etc) which is the same no matter what hardware is spitting out the the ones and zeros.