Before we get into this: I know the basic argument is that it's all down to the mastering, and while I do believe that's true to a very great extent (I think) the question still stands...
...essentially, my question is this: do you get an uplift in audio quality by ripping a file from a disc?
You'd be forgiven for having the knee-jerk reaction of "of course not", but hear me out...the reason I ask is this:
The idea behind SHM-CD is that the material they're manufactured from allows a CD player’s laser to get a better reading as it passes across the notches etched into the disc…
I’ve also read that there’s only an advantage to SHM-CD's if you’re playing the physical disc in a CD player, because it's designed purely to allow the laser to get a better read while passing over the etched notches in real-time…
…In other words, if an SHM-CD and a regular CD both have exactly the same contents, while the SHM-CD may sound better when played by a CD player, you’ll get the same quality rip from both discs regardless.
This would seem to suggest that files ripped from either an SHM-CD, or just a regular CD, could potentially sound like they're of higher quality than the disc they were ripped from...because, rather than the drive trying to read the data in real time over one pass, the drive that's ripping from the disc is (presumably?) taking the time to read all of the information from the disc to create an exact image of the information on the disc.
With regard to SHM-CD's, according to wikipedia "
since the CD-Audio format contains inherent error correction [...] it is not known whether the difference in read errors [with SHM-CD] is great enough to be audibly different." which - in itself - suggests that the real-time laser-reading of a disc is inherently prone to error.
While SHM-CD's rely on
polycarbonate originally developed for LCD screens to aid a better, real-time reading of the disc by the disc-player's laser, Blu-spec CD's use a combination of "
polymeric polycarbonate resin" (Blu-spec CD2 would later use
silicone wafers) and a Blu-ray authoring laser for
a finer etching process to produce more precise notches that reduce playback errors...
...again, we're seeing technological measures taken to reduce errors in the real-time, laser-reading of the physical disc, which does seem to suggest that an exact image of the content of a disc for digital playback can give you a higher quality output than you'd get from a player using a laser to read a disc in real-time.
What's the thinking on this? Are there already theories on this? If not, what do people think?
My own anecdotal input:
While it seems the response to Blu-spec CD & Blu-spec CD2 varies, I personally have
Mountain's Nantucket Sleighride, on both regular CD, Blu-spec CD, and Blu-spec CD2. The Blu-spec CD2 seems granularly better in quality than the Blu-spec CD, and the Blu-spec CD seems granularly better in quality than the regular CD. I'm wondering if there's another, at least granular, increase in quality to be had from ripping the Blu-spec CD2, and indeed whether it's possible to get an uplift in quality when ripping just regular CD's.
What do people think?
