their discs?
not able to tell the difference, though the test might be biased if the folks with the shiny lobes were using high-end CD players that did an especially good job of concealing uncorrectable errors. A legitimate technical concern is that the copy protection reduces the effectiveness of the error correction. Because some percentage of ECC is now required for proper playback on a *clean* disc, the odds of scratches and fingerprints causing audible degradation are increased. In practice, if the “static” samples are relatively few and far between, the difference would be statistically insignificant. One last piece of advice: do not assume that any disc that doesn’t extract cleanly is copy-protected. There have been many, many postings on message boards from people who think they have found a protected disc, or how some specific piece of software can defeat the protection. Start with the more common reasons: the disc is dirty, the disc was poorly made, your CD-ROM drive is not that great at
not able to tell the difference, though the test might be biased if the folks with the shiny lobes were using high-end CD players that did an especially good job of concealing uncorrectable errors. A legitimate technical concern is that the copy protection reduces the effectiveness of the error correction. Because some percentage of ECC is now required for proper playback on a *clean* disc, the odds of scratches and fingerprints causing audible degredation are increased. In practice, if the “static” samples are relatively few and far between, the difference would be statistically insignificant. One last piece of advice: do not assume that any disc that doesn’t extract cleanly is copy-protected. There have been many, many postings on message boards from people who think they have found a protected disc, or how some specific piece of software can defeat the protection. Start with the more common reasons: the disc is dirty, the disc was poorly made, your CD-ROM drive is not that great at
