Why does the copy sound better than the original

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

Al wrote,

"While for several reasons I had high confidence that the copies I created were 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."

Al, I kind of hate to bring this up, and certainly appreciate your due diligence, but doesn't the perfect bit to bit matching of the original and the copy bring into question why you heard differences between the original and the copy? Perhaps you can think of a scientific reason(s) why you heard differences when there were no differences between the data.....

Perhaps you can think of a scientific reason(s) why you heard differences when there were no differences between the data.....

Geoff, I (and also Neil, Nsgarch) already presented exactly those reasons. All of the effects that are discussed in my post in this thread dated 12-2-12, with the exception of the last paragraph, and in the post by Neil dated 12-3-12, have nothing to do with bit errors.

Basically, differences in the physical characteristics of the pits on the disc, and in their spacing, ultimately result in differences in jitter and electrical noise issues. To a greater or lesser extent depending on the design of the particular player, as well as on the particular discs and how they were created.

Regards,
-- Al

Al, but I thought you used one of those fancy CD-Rs for the copy, one with superior jitter characteristics. See, that's what's so puzzling - why you say the copy sounded worse than the original even though a superior low jitter CD-R was used for the copy and the data streams were bit for bit identical. Do you see I mean? Am I missing something?

Al, also wanted to confirm you were using the same player for the comparison, since you just mentioned that the design of the player was a variable. I thought it would be nice if we could eliminate that particular variable.

Geoff