No, obviously none of that paragraph was correct but I was informed that arguing about it was making some people irate, so I posted that paragraph to agree with them, even though it's completely false nonsense.
For example, in iTunes, when ripping a music CD, you have the option to demand that errors not be skipped over, and if an error cannot be fixed by retransmission, the playback will just stop and report an error. If you are trying to read a data CD, computer systems will not tolerate any problem with the data. That is why music CD's and DVD's usually work even if they are heavily scratched, because the software used to read them will just skip over the errors.
No, that's not how CDs/DVDs work. With the ethernet protocol, errors are detected and the affected packets are retransmitted, as you described. However, it's impractical for a laser in a CD player to jump around the disk re-reading and retransmitting any affected data, the data is read sequentially at a specific rate. So at this point of reading, you're correct, errors are effectively just skipped. However, that's not the end of the story: As the retransmission method of error correction isn't practical, CD/DVD use a different type of error correction, Reed-Solomon error correction. Embedded in the audio data is a bunch of redundant data, after the audio data has been read but before it's converted, the data is processed and the redundant data is used to not only detect if there were any errors but to perfectly reconstruct the original data. So the only time there can be any errors in the audio data sent to the converter is when there are so many errors that it overwhelms the error correction, in which case you get "drop-outs". When you rip a CD and play the resulting audio data file on software/a player other than a CD player, this Reed-Solomon processing step probably won't occur and the read errors will not get corrected. This is why iTunes and some other CD ripping software provides the option to correct errors at the point of reading.
Note that there was was no packet loss (0% loss) in the ping command above (Ethernet data is contained in "packets" the integrity of which is verified).
Some here effectively don't believe that digital audio data exists, they seem to think it's something else, analogue audio or even (acoustic) sound. Your post was therefore a waste of time because no amount of proven facts or evidence about digital data or it's integrity can make any difference to those who do not believe that digital data is digital data to start with. ...
Part of the problem is thinking that data integrity is all that matters. Financial transactions don't need to sound good (other than 'kerching' perhaps).
Digital financial transactions, digital audio, digital images or digital whatever, are all just numbers (zeroes and ones) and numbers do not have any sound, look, taste or smell. As digital audio is zeroes and ones that cannot have have any sound then obviously they can't and don't "
need to sound good". If digital audio did not exist and instead what we are transmitting over ethernet was sound, then you're correct, it would "
need to sound good" but likewise, if we're transmitting a photograph over ethernet then the data would need to look good, and the data for a scan of a hamburger would need to taste good. We would need a whole bunch of different ethernet switches and cables for each of these different types of "data" and how would an ethernet cable make the data look good, taste good or smell good anyway? And, if what comes out of an audiophile ethernet cable "sounds good" why do DACs and speakers/HPs still exist, why don't we just listen to the good sound that's coming out of the digital cable?
[1] You are quite right though, it is a question that will not be resolved, [2] despite some thinking that they know all there is to know.
1. The question was resolved nearly a century ago, was proven 75 years ago and then demonstrated to be true in practice 70 years ago.
2. If someone doesn't know that 1+1=2, wouldn't someone else who knows not only how to do simple arithmetic but simple multiplication and division as well, appear to know all there is to know? You don't need to know all there is to know in order to understand that digital data exists and what it is, that's why we can teach it to school kids and university students.
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