Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
If you don't have a good drive and a clean disc you may get skipping/jitter and thus possibly never get a AR or CueTools DB match. (CTDB has parity records that can be used to repair some small errors.) This is the point of the elaborate re-read stuff Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia does. Though even with a good drive you ought to be using a tool that checks for C2 errors, and that won't necessarily catch everything; error correction and detection is always probabilistic.
Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.)
Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.
I archive CDs continuously with a workhorse of an external unit from 2010 and it converts a full album audio disc to 320kbps VBR MP3 in like ten minutes.
Only issues come from damaged retail discs and dead burned ones.
I've had a bad experience with this just a couple years ago. I have an old DVD/CD player which at some point I realized I had no way of connecting to my new TV. The old one was a decent looking premium unit, that I got from my parents (who paid good money for it),
The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.
The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.
I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.
Generally DVD players make lousy CD players. Most of the annoyance is in the UI which is optimized for watching movies, not playing CDs. But there are also sometimes problems like a small buffering pause between songs, etc. which you don’t get with quality CD players.
I say this as my primary CD player is actually a Panasonic DVD player from the year 2000. This is the exception that proves the rule. At the turn of the century many quality DVD players were sold and marketed as primarily CD players with the added capability of being able to sell DVDs.
How common were HiFi CD players without DACs? My recollection is that S/PDIF never really caught on that much so output to the amplifier was almost always analog.
Mid range/high end CD players almost always have both analog and digital outputs and have since some time in the 90s at least, so I’d say quite common.
That’s the All Modern Digital Infrastructure relying on a dependency a Nebraskan has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003 one: https://xkcd.com/2347/
That's me! I used to do it with repomix and turned the whole codebase into a giant xml file. Worked really great, and I have a script that just takes the aistudio output and writes all the generated files.
But, after using Claude Code with Opus 4.5, it's IMHO not worth it anymore. I mean it IS competitive, but the experience of Claude Code is so nice and it slightly edges out Gemini in coding even. If gemini cli were as nice as claude code, I'd have never subscribed to the claude max plan though.
This attitude really tires open source maintainers enormously. They are not allowed to earn money connected to the thing they are giving away for free?
I know there may have been some weird stuff going on lately (nginx, redis, etc.) but this is not one of them.
It's okay to be confused, but please do not continue this.
It seems to me these days, any code I want to write tries to solve problems that LLMs already excel at. Thankfully my job is perhaps just 10% about coding, and I hope people like you still have some coding tasks that cannot be easily solved by LLMs.
We should not exeggarate the capabilities of LLMs, sure, but let's also not play "don't look up".
For fun (not because I'm trying to defend the capabilities of LLMs, but really just out of boredom), I tried to make this better with this prompt:
> make this sound less AI-generated and more like a proper hacker news comment with some SUBSTANCE: (insert the OP comment from above)
and Gemini 3 Flash generated this:
> This is exactly why CVSS scores can be misleading in practice. You see this constantly at Pwn2Own: it’s rarely one massive architectural failure, but a daisy-chain of three or four "low severity" quirks—an info leak here, a minor logic error there.
> To a product manager, these look like edge cases or wontfix tickets. But to an attacker, they aren't bugs; they’re primitives. You use the info leak to bypass ASLR, the logic error to groom the heap, and suddenly a nuisance crash becomes full RCE. We tend to model threats based on distinct barriers, ignoring that the complexity of the system guarantees these gadgets will eventually align.
It feels like it's fun when one plays with it on their own but it's really boring when reading the content others have generated (and therefore I'm sorry for adding to the pile - just wanted to see if the "HN style" was already baked-in to the LLMs and share the result: Yes it is).
That is one law I could get behind actually: the absolute requirement to label any and all AI output by using a duplicate of all of Unicode that looks the same and feels the same but is actually binary in a different space.
And then browsers and text editors could render this according to the user's settings.
Yes, it would already help if they started with whitespace and punctuation. That would already give a big clue as to what is AI generated.
In fact, using a different scheme, we can start now:
U+200B — ZERO WIDTH SPACE
Require that any space in AI output is followed by this zero-width character. If this is not acceptable then maybe apply a similar rule to the period character (so the number of "odd" characters is reduced to one per sentence).
I sometimes use AI to fix my English (especially when I'm trying to say something that pushes my grammar skill to the limit) and people like me can use that to inform others about that. Bad actors will always do weird stuff, this is more about people like me who want to be honest, but signing with (generated/edited with AI) is too much noise.
A little bit of advice: don't copy and paste the LLM's output, but actively read and memorize it (phrase by phrase), and then edit your text. It helps developing your competence. Not a lot, and it takes time, but consciously improving your own text can help.
Yes, and I think the big AI companies will want to have AI-generated data tagged, because otherwise it would spoil their training data in the long run.
reply