PeteH and GrahamN,

My comment was in response to this (incorrect) piece of analysis:

 

Unrecoverable errors in the RS code will cause considerably more interpolation, because a BLOCK (protected by the code) is longer than a sample...

I think everyone agrees that disc read errors are not a significant problem in the sense that the data is correctly recovered (after error correction etc) from the disc.

HOWEVER, if people do want to go back and forth on the problems caused by read errors from the disc, and whether these can bubble up to the interpolation layer, then discussing average error rates isn't going to get you very far, especially when for example surface scratches are the source of correlated errors, which you are currently treating as "random" processes.

That said, if you want to address why transports and cables sound different, you need to stop thrashing on the "non-existant" disc read problem, and look elsewhere for how the differences might arise...