Can anyone comment on why the author suggests to “DISABLE C2 error correction” beyond his assertion that most drives just don’t do it well? Does it impede the process and/or actually produce inferior rips? Or is it just that in the vast majority of ripping outcomes, C2 error correction makes little to no difference ? (and might perhaps even cause issues?)
When ripping with EAC, you want EAC to be doing the error detection/correction, not C2. EAC tries to read the data multiple times and takes the best results. C2 will hide issues in the raw data.
C2 is lossless if the error correction (Reed-Solomon) can reconstruct the data. It interpolates when it can't (therefore lossy).
The gist is that you need to clean your CD's meticulously before ripping them!! Also, clean the CD-ROM player's lens using a cotton swap and lens fluid if you can (wrap the cotton swap with non-abrasive lens cleaning tissue).
If you do that, there will be no audible difference between the ripped version and the data on the original CD (providing you don't have some setting turned on in your ripping software that does some kind of processing of the data). You don't need special software to get a clean rip. I've been doing it this way for decades.
You don't. There's no way to tell from the data stream.
The signal processing IC's do set flags on their pins to indicate whether interpolation was done, but this isn't handed to device driver AFAIK and certainly not passed on to the client software reading the data.
Why bother? If you make a CD drive to go into a computer (and not a stereo cabinet), why bother to have a lossy error correction method, when you must have a lossless one sitting right beside it?
C2 is error detection, not correction. C1 is the error correction. I think what wikipedia is trying to say is that the C2 error detection just points out something is wrong, even after the C1 error correction, and so you can't fix it. But a data CD has additional error correction, so it can correct more errors.
