CD Recordings..... What Do U Know?

Could anyone give a technical explanation of how the sound is supposed to improve ... after all its bits, 1s and 0s on the disk, and the timing (e.g. jitter) is not derived from the disk itself, but from a reference oscillator inside the CD player.
I'm not being a pain-in-the-butt skeptic type .. just really interested how the sound could possibly improve. I can only see room for degradation.

Are you saying that uneven spacing of the pits on the CD contributes to jitter during playback ?

I don't think I can believe this because data is retrieved from the CD at a different rate from the rate at which it is fed to the DAC (this must be the case since the data on the disc also contains error correction redundancies). The clock rate for data retrieval is not the same as the DAC clock rate.

Someone who knows how CD playback really works please straighten this out ... does the inherent jitter in the pit spacing on the CD (which I guess you'd see as a closing eye pattern on the opto detector) translate into greater jitter during playback ? I just can't believe it, but I concede I could be wrong.

Rives .. reclocking is certainly helpful on playback if the transport does not have a very good clock to begin with. I think jitter is the death of CD sound quality, but I also suspect that manufacturers of cheap CD players use jitter as a kind of "dither" to mask shortcomings elsewhere in their signal path .. I'm certain Marantz does this in their low end players. Jitter adds a warmth and mush which helps out a cheap analog output stage.

As for the error rate there is no way to improve on the error rate you started with since if the bit on the original disk is in error then the information which that bit carried is lost forever.
If this bit error is correctable by the error correction coding then it would be just as correctable on the original disk as on the new disk.
Perhaps you can produce a copied disk which will play better on a marginal transport due to having better reflectivity, but in order to produce this better copy you would have had to play it on a better transport in order to read it.
I maintain that a digital copy can only be the same or worse ... it cannot be better, because it cannot retrieve information lost on the original disk.
I'm not trying to pick an argument, and I am really interested if someone can explain why I'm wrong ... because I have been wrong about audio many times in the past (e.g. digital cables can't sound different ... now I realise they can, and that their are sound explainations as to why).

I agree with this point of view. So the copy may sound better if it is played on a machine or DAC which has a worse error correction capability than the machine on which the copy was made. For example playback on a portable CD, copy made on HHB burner.

But the copy can never sound better than the original when both are played on the machine which makes the copies ... you can't doubly correct the errors : the copy will not benefit from the error correction when it is played on the burner since its errors are already corrected.

So I think you'd do better to buy the best possible CD playback machine, rather than a cheaper playback and a copy machine.

And the high error rate on the original is caused by poor mastering, not by jitter inherent in the disk. Jitter is a function of the transport, not the disk itself.