Here's how a CD copy of a copy can sound better


Just wanting to check my logic here. People keep saying how burning CD copies at 1x speed allow them to sound better (than 32x speed, say) when being played back through Audiophile systems. I have burned copies of several CD's at 8x, and do not have the original. I should be able to take these copies and make re-copies at 1x speed, and these 1x copy-of-a-copy copies should sound better than their counterparts, right?

There is no data lost when a CD is copied, only placed on the disc differently. This is evidenced by the fact that you can copy a CD-ROM, which is a bit-perfect copy.
matt8268
CD roms and audio CDs use different error correction, so I think it's not true to infer that audio CDs have a zero errors just because you can retrieve files without error from a CD-ROM.

I personally don't believe that a copy can sound better. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of how they possibly could.
The hard yards to overcome in CD playback and recording are timing errors, not bits. You may trap all the bits but if the timing is not perfect (and it never is) you'll get jitter which, if gone untreated, turns some people into LP junkies.
I agree with Rockvirgo that the errors are not in the bits. But when we are talking about going from digital to digital, we are not talking about jitter either. Jitter is the distortion introduced due to timing errors during the analog to digital or the digital to analog conversion. CD to CDR involves no analog phase.

It is my belief that CDR's should sound identical to CD's and I have never been able to hear a difference. As I understand it, the only way a CDR could introduce jitter is if the physical layout of the bits on the CDR are not fixed, meaning that the burnt in physical orientation could vary from the intended original orientation which could then introduce a timing problem on playback. But to my understanding (and I do not know for sure), the physical orientation of the blank is in fact fixed, ie, we could point to a specific spot on the blank disk and say "the first bit will go there, the second there, and so on." Am I wrong about this?
I agree with the above posts. I am the owner of a media duplication company; and we duplicate CDs, CD-ROMs, and DVDs. Based upon my 13+ years in the commercial audio and video business I think I can say with some certainty that if you want to duplicate a CD and get decent results it has to be done at 1X or 2X speeds.
Not only do higher duplication speeds create jitter and timing errors; but resulting discs usually sounds flat and lacking in dynamics. I recently duplicated over 200 CD-Rs that each had a different radio commercial on them. They were entries in a festival for Radio & TV Commercial producers. At least 10% of the entries were unplayable. In doing some follow-up, I called the producers and almost every single CD-R that would not play in the five CD players in our studios was "burned" on a computer at high speed.
So take a word of advice - and stick to 1X or 2X CD duplication if you want to get some decent results. Happy listening.