I'll take a shot at this. Basically when writing to a CDR or reading from, there can be errors. There's many factors that can play a part in the cause of the errors. There's two major ways errors are corrected so that it plays back the cd correctly. 1. Error correction 2. Error concealment. Error correction is where the player reads the sample and sees that there is an error because it does not match the error check parity bits, so it will change the data upon playback, so the sample is correct as compared to the parity bits. "Exmple=>Example." Error concealment is where enough bits are unknown within the sample that error correction will not work. So what it does is look at the previous sample and following sample and takes it's best guess at what the sample "probably" is. "This Is .. Example=> This is an Example"

Well all CD player error concealment and error correction techniques are not created equal. So if there is a high amount of errors written to the disc, it may play fine in one player and not another. So, what we want is a way to know how many errors got written to the disc so that we can feel confident when handing it to a client that it will play fine, and also if it's being replicated we don't want all those errors duplicated, so that it exponentially causes the same problem. I had a similar problem as this, when I first started burning CDr's. I would burn a CD in CD architect. CD architect tells me it completed without errors. I check the CD that it plays fine in my studio CD player, then the client takes it home and it doesn't work in the majority of their players. It was a nightmare for about 2 months, that I couldn't figure out, and I kept getting complaints. I was screaming at CD architect and I was screaming at my Yamaha CD recorder, and I was buying every type of CDR to record on. I ended up buying a new CD recorder, which weren't too cheap at that time and my problems disappeared. Well a couple of months later, I found the source of my problem was with my SCSI card, that it had a problem with certain Yamaha drives. I updated the firmware on the SCSI card and those nightmares went away. So if I had a way, to check for those errors, I could know before hand if there was a high error rate, before letting things go out the door.