i.e. give me your best technical jargon!
We use the exact same commercial grade CD ripping/duplication equipment that was the chosen solution for EMI (Abbey Road in particular), Sony Music, A&M, Capitol Records, Reprise, Warner Brothers, Imax, and many others. This equipment was chosen by these recording companies for it’s ability to make frame accurate copies that could be verified. CD-DA (Red Book) is considered unverifiable but our equipment’s frame accurate imaging and reproduction make it possible.
Audio CD-DA discs do not have the same EDC (Electronic Data Capture) and ECC (Error Correcting Code) of data discs. They do however have a form of EDC and ECC. Each frame or block of an audio CD is 2352 while a typical data disc is 2048 bytes. More bytes are used for ECC and EDC in a data disc block than an audio CD as they need to be more robust. With Audio CDs, modern players can hide errors with over sampling and recover from errors with techniques such as average, holds, and mutes. During ripping our equipment monitors the C1 and C2 decoder errors coming off the drive. E11, E21, E12, E22 are all recoverable with data redundancy, although an E32 (3 errors in the second stage of error correction) is not recoverable and we will fail the disc. Many modern drives will still play these discs and consequently rip them. This is why only certain optical drives are supported in our equipment/software. This helps guarantee that the process always delivers the quality rip we desire from each CD.
The equipment we use is the equipment same equipment used by Fortune 500 companies, the US government, and significant institutions such as the the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the BBC, CBC, NPR, NHS, The National Archives of New Zealand and Australia, The NewYork City Archive, professional archivists like Iron Mountain, Preservation Technologies, and countless other university archives & libraries. In addition, it was vetted by George Blood Audio and became their standard.