WiFiJeff, the CD medium was invented for audio, and the CD-ROM format was built "on top of that". The audio CD format was designed to tolerate a certain amount of read errors. Audio CD players not only have error correction, but where that isn't possible, they go into error concealment modes (sample value interpolation or in extreme cases, sample value "holding") that generally fool most people's ears most of the time, and if the damage is so great that even error concealment can't be applied, they mute for a few milliseconds and go on.
But error concealment (which falsifies the data) is unacceptable for CD-ROM data retrieval; a single wrong bit in an executable file (if the CD-ROM was a software distribution disc) could crash the user's computer. So the CD-ROM format was designed with a considerable amount of additional, redundant data so that (a) even moderately severe disc damage still wouldn't cause any read errors, but just as importantly (b) the system would never allow a read error to "slip through" unnoticed--the hardware would always report such errors as failures. That way, incorrect data would never be read from the disc under the mistaken impression that it was correct data.
(By "never" I mean, with such a low probability that the odds were, it would never happen in many thousands of years with many, many users--although it's not completely, 100.00000000000% impossible; it would, however, require coincidences that are nearly unthinkable, like the same person winning the lottery jackpot every day for several months running type of thing.)
Anyway my point is, if you record .wav or flac files AS FILES rather than as audio tracks, the reliability of the system increases enormously--for all practical purposes, if you're able to read the files from the CD, you've got the right information. Whereas with audio discs there is a certain looseness, because it's well known that the ear is rather easily fooled up to a point. For example, in the cases where I had made two or three audio discs from the same set of WAV source files, sometimes EAC would extract the same wav files from some tracks on multiple discs, but not other tracks from the same discs. It has been rare that two audio CDs, both made from the same set of WAV files on the same recorder on the same day, have extracted exactly the same--even though EAC reports no errors, and if I extract the same tracks multiple times from either CD alone, I get consistent results for each disc--just not the same results from all (or both) the discs.
Moral of the story is, from an accuracy standpoint, audio CDs aren't as good for long-term storage as data CDs (or data DVD-Rs) that contain your wave audio as data, whether as uncompressed linear PCM or as FLAC files.
My apologies if you already knew all this stuff, but it's been a long time since it was new information that had to be thoroughly discussed, and I don't know whether you were around back then (1980s) or not.
--best regards