A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

However, I have heard rumors - unverified, but from people I'm inclined to believe - of players where the pickup *additionally* has a signal for whether or not it was successful in grabbing a given sample.

The reason why this would be important for coming up with a theoretically perfect dump is that many discs these days have minor dropouts that would be quite difficult indeed to correct manually by merging together captures of multiple different examples of the same disc.

In principle, knowing whether a single sample of the analog data was "good" or not would enable a sufficiently dedicated person to construct a capture with *zero* horizontal streaking or other artifacting due progressive rot.

If you digitize a vinyl LP or an audio cassette 100 times, you will get 100 different sets of digital data, and no one of them, nor any composite you can make from them, are "correct". This is true for all analog recording systems.

That's basic information theory, not something I'm making up. But I'll shut up now.

No, they're not "correct" in the literal sense. I don't debate that. But if you have two captures of two tapes, with both having had the mylar physically damaged in different spots, then shouldn't it be viable to splice the two together to form a capture better than either one?

Yes. That can be done without sampling at the optical pickup. The optical pickup gives you no additional information that's useful for that.

The optical pickup can't magically tell whether a bit of oxidation of the aluminum or a scratch on the surface has made a pit look more like a land. It can only tell you if the laser is significantly out of focus, which only happens with severe laser rot, or broken player.