I didn't start claiming anything at all. It's you who started it. Please don't confuse my first post as a claim such as 'CD transport/player is superior.' I never said that in the first post. I said 'some was over-confident enough to say it's even better than expensive disc players/transport.'. It's not the same statement as I said 'expensive cd transport/player is better than file transport' but pointing out there's people saying the opposite. I hope this will clear out our confusion here.
The only matter of fact I firstly said here was 'some people were over-confident enough to claim it's better than expensive cd transport'. That's all there is to it as the matter of fact not opinion. I actually could say the same too since my music server projects already outperformed many CD transports under $3k and it's not me but my clients who said all that. I weren't that confident enough to say it out myself. No my opinion about cd transport being superior to file or anything explicitly implied until you claimed that some of your files ripped to your hard drive are better than they are on discs they came from. So I disagreed with information from my experiments and my studies in proper classes with many experiments from real hiend sources. But if I have to say so, I've yet to see any hifi distributor selling real hiend sources prefer any kind of music server over their reference cd/sacd transport except when they're doing their marketing jobs.
To get back to the point, all I've said so far is for asking to know your support evidence about "sometimes files ripped to my hard drive are better than they are on the discs they came from". So please ignore all my foolish posts and just tell me how you reached to the conclusion. That's what I really want to know so that I could try repeating the same experiment as yours and see if I could reach to the same conclusion as yours as I couldn't with other experiments I tried here ranging from bundle slotin drive in laptop to one of the best studio mastering drive. Ripping and playing with the same drive and same program. No matter what kind here, drive always be better than files stored in HDD.
I hope you'll be kind enough to share how you reached to that conclusion in here so people can try and see as guidelines in case I may miss out something. Playing ripped contents to compare with original drive is different story from comparing between mastering file from file transport and disc from cd/sacd transport. I tried writing 16/44.1 track from Kent Poon DVD I bought but never manage to rip it back as the same as original file I wrote to CD even with Plextor Premium 2 here using EAC/dbpoweramp/PlexTools. They sound different and I'm trying to findout why and how I can correct this so I could restart my ripping journey again. Though I'm quite skilled at building music server for file transport but I may not have everything covered for ripping part.
I reached that conclusing by sticking a Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers CD that had always had a digital read error on it, in the slot-fed optical drive of my MacBook Pro, ripping it to my hard drive using that esoteric, high-end CD ripping software, iTunes, with the result of a file on my hard drive without the error. The conclusion was supported by a couple of more CDs with errors on them that were corrected in the ripping process. It was denied by one CD error that would not correct.Has anyone else experienced this when ripping CDs to hard drive?
I already answered that question a couple of times, by the way, though not with quite that level of detail. The problem seems to be your ability to believe it. Unfortunately I'm not sure you could actually repeat the experiment without having my copy of Into The Great Wide Open.
Now, you seem to have been, at the very least, implying strongly that, above a certain price/quality level ($3k or so, is it?), an optical transport out-performs servers on the noise and jitter fronts. You evidently believed that was the subject of our discussion at one point, as you were trying to ascertain my ability to understand any supporting evidence you might present regarding jitter. Thank yor for that kind consideration, but no answer, clear or cryptic, has come forth. Do you have anything to support the notion that high-end optical drives have lower noise and jitter than servers, or are you now saying that you don't believe they do?
Tim