[mk]

Herbie,

No cd mat page at the site.  Is there a problem?

Mark

[Herbie]

Hi, Mark. Just temporary; we're putting in a new menu bar. The CD mats page will be accessible from the "CD/DVD Mats" link near the top of most pages on our website, or directly here:

http://herbiesaudiolab.net/cdmat.htm

Steve
Herbie's Audio Lab

[kenreau]

Hi Steve,

Your new Super Black Hole CD Mat looks impressive.  Do you know if it offers any benefits when ripping/back up cd's to a hard drive?  I'm slowly going through getting all my CDs ripped/backed up on to my music server hard drive and wondered if this mat may offer some sonic benefits with this process.

Thanks
Kenreau
 

[Herbie]

We have some customers who use The Black Hole when ripping CDs. Results vary. It's my understanding that the potential for improvement when ripping CDs is much less than playing back CDs. The reason is because when recording CDs, you have better error correction than in playback. When recording, you have redundant binary correction, with playback, error correction relies on a lot of algorithm-based "guesswork."

Steve
Herbie's Audio Lab

[mk]

Although my Marantz SACD player makes an alarming noise wearing the Super Black Hole when it reads the TOC, the sound it produces is better in every way.  Each generation of your cd mats has bettered its predecessor.   

[pulsetsar]

Hi Steve,

Your new Super Black Hole CD Mat looks impressive.  Do you know if it offers any benefits when ripping/back up cd's to a hard drive?  I'm slowly going through getting all my CDs ripped/backed up on to my music server hard drive and wondered if this mat may offer some sonic benefits with this process.

Thanks
Kenreau

There is a software product called dBpoweramp that will rip your music to the hard drive and generate a CRC code that it then compares to a database of other users ripping results (it calls this technology AccurateRip). Since CRC codes are very sensitive to the smallest changes in data, if you have a match you can be assured of an accurate rip (bit for bit). I used this to rip most of my library to my hard drive and for those CD's that didn't rip accurately, I borrowed a friend's copy to rip if available and this would often solve the problem. Since the software uses pretty good error correction, this was a rare occurrence.