Is this the reason why some people like vintage CD players that have the slower DAC chips like the TDA1541 ? The slower chips leading to less read errors
Regards,
Anwesh
The sole function of the DAC is to do the signal reconstruction so the type has nothing to do with the error correction ability. Error correction is handled by a separate controller associated with the CD transport. The original high performance readers from Philips started to disappear some decades ago as CD popularity waned in favour of other disc formats leading to a rise in multi-format players essentially using a computer drive and the jitter of the output data stream can be higher unless the designer deals with it in the DAC section which is why vintage CD players may be preferred. The TDA1541A -S2 Double Crown Selection was highly revered back in the day and likely what has contributed to the enthusiasm for traditional resistor ladder DACs due to the slightly lower sensitivity to clock jitter compared to low bit D-S converters.
Back in the day, one of the metrics was the error gap length and Philips transports were able to handle 3 to 4 mm gaps before an audible click. This is possible due to the way the data is coded on the disc.
One thing to point out as a key difference between an audio CD and a CD-ROM is the number of layers of error correction. The audio CD has 3 levels of error correction compared to a 4 levels in a CD-ROM. Also, the audio data is not sequentially stored as PCM but scrambled. If you imagine an A4 sheet of text as being like the decoded audio and you were to punch a small hole in the disc, you don't get a single period of missing data but a series of smaller gaps within the sheet. This is the result of the cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon code and the EFM (Eight to Fourteen modulation) combined with the checksum stored in the TOC.
