CD duplicate...

Nutella, Pbowne, would you tell us what 2ch audio Gear you are using for you a/b comparison. CDp, Preamp, Amp, Speakers, cable?

I will join the camp that says under certain conditions a CD-R copy can sound better than original CD, especially a poorly recorded one.

There is an article in current Positive Feedback about completely tweaked out CD-R unit from company called "Reality Check CD" that you should read. Positive Feedback author is completely sold after having two of his CDs burned on this tweaked CD-R.

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue16/RealityCheck.htm

Design theory is that mass produced "stamped" CD will never have superior readability of the more pronounced pits found on "burned" CD-R. Article expalins other features/technologies used in this tweaked CD-R unit.

Megasam, First let me say, mighty nice system you have. Given the source, and the object is to duplicate the source. How then can the duplicate be better than the source? Granted a poorly recorded cd thru tweaking a copy can be made to sound better. I read the article, whats with the no SFVs, to be sent for the $5.00 copy offer? Do you have a cd burner? If so have you done a/b comparisons of a good quality cd ,say like, Diana Krall "The Girl In The Other Room", played back on your Musical Fidelity A3 CDP, would the musical presentation be better than the original?

Ttrhp, I have to use cd-r audio disc in my Sony W222ES cdr. The best I have found that will get me the closest to an exact copy of a "DK" cd is the Maxell cd-r audio. Japan "Taiyo Yuden" made. That I learned last week from a few fellow agoners. If you subscribe To "Stereophile" check out Vol 25 No.6 Alesis Master Link ML 9600 hard-disk/CD-R recorder. List $1699. They gave it an "A" rating. It`s a good read.

Jea48, Theta Data II, GW labs DSP, Museatex Bitstream, John Wright modded conplete with black gates, Joule LA100 mk III, Atma-Sphere S-30, Coincident Victories. The system is very revealing. The digital front end is ridiculously good for the money. Cables are coincident TRS speaker cable, Purist Museas and Sonoran Plateau for IC's, Harmonic Tech platinum digital IC's.
The reason the duplicate can be better than the source can be found by reading the 6moons article on EAC.
Since cd's are stamped. the lands and grooves representing the data may not be perfect. Jitter is caused in this case and the transport attempts to perform error correction to compensate. The transport can only read what is reflected by the laser. When the pits in the disc are not well defined, the slight timing errors may be introduced into the data stream.
With EAC, the computer reads the data on the disc, determines the improperly defined data, sometimes reads this hard to read data several times to derermine what is there and creates an copy of this data. When burned onto a good disk, the data is written more precisely than say a hundred CD's running through a stamping machine.
It is like trying to read somebodies messy hand writing. If somebody takes the time to copy it word for word neatly, it is easier to read. If it is easier for your transport to read....
As I stated, obvious improvements were made on poorly recorded and average discs. With really well recorded material such as bluenote or chesky, the differences were negligable. Probably only due to the black disk being used for the copy.

Jea48
To add to Nutella, the CD-R copy "can" sound better because the data copied is easier to read by your CD player than mass produced CD. The physical burning with laser used to copy data to CD-R is different and superior process to mass produced stamping for commercial music CDs. Also the dyes, metal layer, and protective coating can be superior with quality blank CD-Rs.

Different brands of blank CD-Rs can sound slightly different, black CD-Rs are popular as well as premium brands like Mitsui. The quality of the CD-R drive doing the burning, laser used etc can also vary results. Finally different burning software can have variable results, most popular commercial brands are Roxio, Nero, Musicmatch, Recordnow. Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is available as free download.

Anyway fun and inexpensive to experiment with, as mentioned above most dramatic improvements can be heard on CDs that are not well recorded and have typical CD grain/glare/sibliance. Almost all new computers with CD-R drive have some CD burn software installed so play around and experiment....or just skip all the trail and error and check into getting tricked out Reality CD burner mentioned in Positive Feedback article.