@becomethewaifu @thomasfuchs > "less obvious" that an optical disc can trivially keep up with playing compressed music if the player already knows where on the disc to find it.

Assuming zero buffering pre-read, even a 2x CD drive should keep up with continuous data for a 96khz 24-bit FLAC file. (A smarter player would of course cache several seconds ahead of time including for the previous-file/next-file switch such that seeking would also not be noticeable.)

Audio just really doesn't take all that much IO bandwidth to work out.