I recently broke the habit of ripping every new CD I bought to FLAC, since I realized that I hardly listen to 90% of the tracks left on my hard drive. I thought it'd be much more practical to just listen to music the old fashioned way, by putting in the actual CD.

But I am curious as to whether there is an absence of jitter when playing music straight from my DVD drive. From what I understand, ripping a CD creates a jitter-free file if your hardware supports a secure ripping mode. However, if a CD is being played back in real-time using this hardware, is jitter still eliminated?

I don't think so. Jitter is always basically going to be around if you're moving digital stuff around.

Yes, FLAC is jitter free. It's a file format, it's static, there's no jitter stored in a file, it's impossible.

Jitter is a function of the clock accuracy on the S/PDIF transmitter, and as such affectes everything output over that connection equally.

What ripping in secure mode does is ensure that the rip is bit-for-bit identical to the data on the CD, resorting to additional reads if necessary to assure that, in contrast playing the CD directly relies on the error correction in the drive to fix "miss-reads", and it's possible for the ECC to not correctly correct some errors.

As far as jitter goes, the data is buffered and read asyncronously off the drive so there is no jitter associated with reading the data off the drive. Jitter is inconsistencies in the clock and requires a syncronous link (like S/PDIF) to be transmitted.

I am curious as to whether there is an absence of jitter when playing music straight from my DVD drive.

You already got correct answers, but the real correct answer is that jitter is a non-issue with modern digital gear. Jitter artifacts are typically 110 dB or more below the music, and thus are inaudible.

Given all the things that actually do harm the music - loudspeaker distortion, room modes, early reflections - worrying about jitter is pointless.

--Ethan