>I even personally investigated CD accuracy in burning using an electron microscope to understand how the laser burning process worked on the plastic media. It

>I even personally investigated CD accuracy in burning using an electron microscope to understand how the laser burning process worked on the plastic media. It was absurdly inaccurate. I can believe that, but the standard was designed to tolerate high bit error rates. 25% of the bits are redundant, as part of a error correction code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-interleaved_Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-interleaved_Reed%E2%80%9... This scheme works very well, as proved by people consistently ripping bit-for-bit identical copies of CDs pressed or burned with the same audio.