... compounds to allow CDs to be recorded and rerecorded by powerful lasers and magnetic heads. The key technology needed to realise optical discs, apart from the laser, is error correction. Without it, optical discs would be far more sensitive and prone to errors than they are known to be today. Error correction, specifically the Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code (CIRC,) allows small errors in the read signal to be seemlessly corrected by applying mathematical transformations. Prerecorded audio CDs Audio CDs contain audio data which has been encoded into a fixed-rate digital bitstream. The audio is sampled at a rate of exactly 44.1 kHz to a resolution of 16 bits, and two channels of such data are stored to give stereo output. This yields a bit rate of approximately 1.4 Mb/s, and such measures are often invoked to compare sound quality of digital audio media and encoding schemes. Generally, a higher bitrate means a ...

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