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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: There's a strong possibility that it won't move past sighted listening.

"Tony, if the MD5 checksums of the ripped files are identical, then it doesn't matter what CD/DVD drive they were ripped from or how those drives were powered."

That is not necessarily so. Unlikely, yes. If I have two files on two different drives and they both have the same MD5 checksum it does not follow that playing them back will result in the same sound quality for reasons that have been thoroughly discussed over the years in this forum. For example, one drive might be an SSD and another spinning rust, etc... The same argument can apply if both files are on the same volume. One might be fragmented, the other might not. For sure they won't share the same sectors on the disk drive. They will have different file names. It is possible to come up with various (more or less unlikely) scenarios whereby two files on the same drive that have the same MD5 checksums might sound different. Of course if you are convinced that there will be no difference and you don't listen carefully there will be a good chance that you will miss the difference that is there. There is the problem of the "unseen gorilla". This is why it is necessary to keep an open mind.

N.B. This line of reasoning does not justify throwing money at scam artists peddling obvious snake oil. But one must keep an open mind and if one does ignore a suspect peddler it may turn out that his snake oil was the genuine article. Although I try to keep an open mind, sometimes this is difficult. However, life is short. Unless someone is paying me well to evaluate a situation or I am devilishly full of curiosity, I tend to pay little heed to suggestions from people whom I've categorized as fools, idiots or assholes. Such characters can be found all over various Internet forums.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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