Ripped Off!

I promise to get off of my recent "audiophile" kick. Son. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and my bliss has been upset as I have learned more about how music is transferred from audio disks to digital files. Pop your CD into iTunes and rip it ... right? iTunes is pretty good at creating a digital copy from the physical CD, but there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. iTunes has an option to improve the Rip accuracy, and that slows things down considerably with marginal – or even negative – improvement.

Ripping is not simply a one-to-one process of transferring bits from CD to disk. I know this is counter-intuitive. Although the CD is a digital medium, reconstructing the bits to feed into the circuitry that converts it into an analog signal is complex and error prone. Incidentally, CD players themselves vary in how well they do this translation. Serious audiophiles will spend over ten thousand dollars on "reference CD players," like the Simaudio Moon Evolution Andromeda Reference CD Player. Yikes!

So, do you think that cheap CD transport in your PC is going to keep up with a $12,000 reference CD player? The surprising answer is, it could: using software that follows the AccuateRip algorithms you should be able do even better. There is only one problem: it takes time and a lot of processor! For example, AccuateRip found a number of errors on one of my favorite CDs: the Borodin Quartets 1 and 2, performed by the Borodin String Quartet. XLD, which implements AccurateRip on the Mac, found a number of errors:

All Tracks
    Statistics
        Read error                           : 0
        Skipped (treated as error)           : 0
        Edge jitter error (maybe fixed)      : 1
        Atom jitter error (maybe fixed)      : 11
        Drift error (maybe fixed)            : 0
        Dropped bytes error (maybe fixed)    : 1
        Duplicated bytes error (maybe fixed) : 1

Now, I'll admit that I've never noticed errors on this CD, but if there is a problem, I want it fixed! In fact, I have a few CDs with obvious problems. Paul Crossley's Complete Piano Music of Poulenc comes to mind: the second and third CDs had so many defects that I couldn't stand to listen any longer. XLD completely cleaned up the second CD and was able to rescue all but the final tracks on the third.

This is the proverbial "good news/bad news." The good news is that most defects can be repaired. The bad news is that it is a time consuming activity. With over 1,000 CDs, re-ripping everything is out of the question. However, I'm re-ripping those few with obvious flaws and favorites with an abundance of rich sound. Perhaps I'll eventually get around to everything.