An SCP file is NOT a direct measurement or representative capture of the flux transitions on the media. It's the output of a machine that imperfectly tries to measure them and inserts noise and delays into the data instead.

And not only in a meaningless "not as accurate" sense -- the drive loses exactly the information that's critical to implementing a working copy. That's why you have to sample a track multiple times for the benefit of downstream analysis/RE tools, and why a naive capture can't be written back to a disk to get the same results.

It's not a good situation. A driver reader that *could* measure the actual flux transitions wouldn't have these problems, but we don't have such a device yet.

My point was that a true capture is/should-be possible, but not with the hardware as implemented by Greaseweazel et. al.