How is it possible that a laptop can read a CD flawlessly, but every other device I've tried the CD on skips at certain parts?

Mothra@mander.xyz to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 29 points –

I've had this CD for ages. Decades. It would always skip at a certain parts on two of its tracks. I've never in my life heard the full CD because of this reason, always having to skip forward to the next track.

I've listened to it on at least four different devices, among them a very large Sony home stereo system. I've always thought the CD was faulty.

But today, I ripped the CD on a cheap old laptop and guess what. For the first time in my life I heard the whole uninterrupted tracks. What is this sorcery? Can someone explain?

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Cd drives in computers are more technical than standard stereo players due to their nature of writing to cds. Think higher quality, more accurate equipment.

Edit to add: I remember this was an issue Sony faced, it was selling higher quality dvd players in its PlayStation 2 cheaper than its standalone dvd player series.

So... It is actually a faulty cd by general standards, especially the time of its release as I don't think laptops were that popular, and one with a CD reader would have been an expensive rarity.

I'm still perplexed though

Yes bad cd, just the laptop cd drive can read with greater error checking (parity?) to achieve skip free playing.

It's scary how much is clipped away from music with compression and poor playback equipment. Sometimes the right setup really changes the song.

The issue with CDs isn't the compression, since music in CDs isn't compressed.

CDs are getting read at a rate of 44000 times a second. Sometimes this frequency will cancel out the Digital information on the CD under circumstances that can't be stopped. The better the correction of this naturally occurring error, the more natural the CD sounds.

That's a pretty bad explanation, but that's the main reason CDs can sound way different to LPs.