I believe that in the world of digital 1's and 0's it makes absolutely no difference if you use a £20 cheap computer CD drive vs a multi £thousand high end cd player to READ the information - the only important part of playback is the DAC. To say that the DAC is sensitive to input errors is true to some extent, but look at the Benchmark DAC-1. It removes all the jitter from a bad source.
Thank about it. Every application on my PC requires bit-perfect execution, if there was even a small error then the program would crash spectacularly.
In actual fact hard drives and CD drives do produce a number of errors when reading, but these are corrected well within execution tolerance
We have Reed-Solomon error correction which restores the information exactly, read errors or not - they are corrected back to the original information precisely.
Reducing the read errors, makes no difference to the end product if the end product is identical regardless of being reproduced from lots of errors, or no errors.
Anyway check this out (taken from wiki)
"There has been a move by the
recording industry to make audio CDs (CDDAs,
Red Book CDs) unplayable on computer CD-ROM drives, to prevent the copying of music. This is done by intentionally introducing errors onto the disc that the embedded circuits on most stand-alone audio players can automatically compensate for, but which may confuse CD-ROM drives."
Deliberate errors!
As for cables.. I have NEVER heard a difference and I get bored just thinking about constructing an argument based on my experiences.