Audible difference CD vs ripped vs hiRes

[jeroen524]

A new topic, as suggested by Paul when I asked him about audible differences between hiRes and ripped CD.

He mentioned conventional wisdom saying ripped CD is better than CD. In my experience it is very close. Connection to DAC played a bigger part.

I have played the same track simultaneously on 1. MF CD, 2. Naim UnitiCore via Coax and same MF Dac as CD player, and 3. Auralic mini from the Uniticore and optical cable to MF DAC and also via Auralic DAC and found not much difference, apart from Auralic being a bit more ‘transparent’ but touch bass shy, especially via its own DAC. Large and obvious difference was in different interconnect cables, with RcA vdHul D102mk3 clearly worse than Atlas Element Integra 2 RCA and Atlas optical better than coax.
I now bought gold plated BNC-RCA connection for coax rather than standard Naim steel adapter, hope that improves the coax and I try to keep coax away from other cables.

But Auralic sitting idle now as I cannot be bothered with switching on another machine, and one that gets very hot. Got to say I like the DS lightning app of Auralic better than the Naim app driving UnitiCore, more stable and much more search/playlist features, but it suffers from the unfriendly naim meta data formats and sometimes mixes up titles and tracks of various albums.

Has anyone noticed more or less “mishaps” with ripped CDs vs playing a CD? Does the CD player have a harder job doing corrections whilst spinning or is that the same during a rip? Or entirely dependent on hardware ?
Keen to hear your thoughts.

[Suedkiez]

@jeroen524

Does the CD player have a harder job doing corrections whilst spinning or is that the same during a rip? Or entirely dependent on hardware ?

When you rip with a good ripper (e.g. dBpoweramp), it compares the result by checksum with checksums uploaded by other people. So you know if the rip is accurate - you can’t have that for a CD player. It’s hardware dependent in so far as a poor player or scratched CDs can produce uncorrectable errors (errors that cannot be corrected fully by the frame encoding) leading to interpolation of the data, hence information loss. On the other hand, a reasonable player and OK CDs should rarely produce reading errors, I suppose - my cheapo Dell USB player/writer produces accurate rips each time according to dBpoweramp even in burst mode (without error recovery by re-reading). Another thing to consider is that a CD player must read the data in time, so there is limited possibility for correction. A ripper can use secure mode instead of burst mode, i.e. slow down, re-read data, etc.