Why does the copy sound better than the original

Al wrote,

"The differences were extremely small, and were perceivable just on certain notes, from time to time. In all cases, however, the original was clearly better than the copy, notwithstanding the subjective nature of "better" Mr. T referred to earlier."

I suppose one might ask, how can you say the differences were "extremely small," just barely perceptible on certain notes, yet in the same breath say the original was "clearly better than the copy." The results do not appear to support such a conclusion at all.

Al also wrote,

"And per the quotes and links I provided earlier, the existence of those differences is technically plausible, and explainable based on concepts that are well recognized in electronic design."

I'm not sure I would say Science has come to the rescue, as you apparently wish to do, based on the results you described. I suspect inconclusive results might be a more appropriate conclusion.

12-09-12: Geoffkait
I suppose one might ask, how can you say the differences were "extremely small," just barely perceptible on certain notes, yet in the same breath say the original was "clearly better than the copy." The results do not appear to support such a conclusion at all.

There is no inconsistency there, Geoff. What I was trying to say would have come across more clearly if after the words "clearly better than the copy" I had added the words "upon very careful comparison." And I'll add now that while the differences were small, and a lot of the time there was no difference, ALL of the perceivable differences were in the direction of being better on the original.

Marqmike, thanks very much for the kind compliment.

Regards,
-- Al

Al,

Thanks for taking the time to do the CD copy to original CD listening test experiment.
Jim

Al, i hate judge before all the facts are in but it looks to me like "the copy sounds better than the original" will be joining the illustrious ranks of the Mpingo disc, Shakti Stone, Intelligent Chip, Schumann frequency generator, CD demagnetization, PWB Silver Rainbow Foil, Cream Electret, WA Quantum Chips, wire/fuse directionality, tube dampers, crystals, Green pen, destat guns and ionizers for CDs and cables, contact enhancers, ERS paper, you know, insofar as it's apparently impossible to get unanimous agreement not only for how they work but whether the damn things even work at all!

One more thing I should add to the description I provided yesterday of the experiment I performed:

While for several reasons I had high confidence that the copies I created contained bit-perfect replicas of the digital data on the original CD's, to be completely certain of that I put one of the tracks I used in the experiment through some software which computed what are known as MD5 checksums of that data.

As expected, the MD5 checksums of the original and the copy matched perfectly, which confirms that all of the approximately 300,000,000 bits of that track were identical on the original and the copy.

Regards,
-- Al