MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat

But the general consensus is that there's no real 'gold standard'

All methods have flaws.

Trurip seem to be trying to be rather aggressive, and my experience with them is that they'll ignore facts if it suits them (eg they're trying to push for MAME to drop CHD container support and use their uncompressed images, even if has been explained to them that the format they use for their images doesn't meet the basic requirements for a MAME archival container format with the inbuilt checksums etc. for both fast and slow verification)

This makes me more inclined to ignore them as it makes me think they'd be equally willing to ignore other things when it comes to the actual dumping.

Then again, most of the groups seem to be guilty of similar behaviour at one time or another, pushing convoluted ripping chains and such, requiring specific drives because they give consistent results, even if later it's been questioned if they're actually just consistently wrong. (eg. PC drive firmwares changing gap times to something 'sensible' rather than reporting the true values)

It's not just the CD media dumping groups either, the whole situation reminds me a lot of some of the issues we had with Guru, where he seemed to think his dumps were unquestionable.