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

I have made recordings from a Pioneer cd recorder, Fostex pro cd recorder and from a pc. The Pioneer and the Fostex copies sound the same as the source, the pc recordings to me sound less dynamic and more compressed. This may be due to my cd recorder and computer soundcard. I notice that if I copy at four times speed on the pc the sound is is more compressed and less musical. This may be system dependent as I have much more money in the Fostex and the Pioneer recorders. I also use a Fostex DAT and it makes excellent recordings. Another positive with pro equipment there is no copyright issues and you can make as many digital copies as you please and you can use computer blank cdr(less expensive than cdr for a home audio recorder)

If you are going from a digital source to digital source and use any recorder that has jitter reduction you can often improve the sound. Professional equipment usually has very good clocking and you can often improve the sound. PCs can too improve the sound, but as Rec points out, if you are using an analog source you need to have a good sound card or your copy will sound considerably worse than the original.

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.

you should admit that re-recording will not be better than original in any case.
you can make it sound better if you will re-master from original tape but there you should face the copyright issues.

In digital, unlike analog, re-recording can actually make it better (not just sound better, but really technically better). Jitter occurs at both the record end and the playback end. If you can eliminate or reduce the jitter at the recording phase, then the result is a better disc that has less jitter on the playback. Now, how does this work? First assume the original disc has jitter of X. Your playback system has jitter reduction to some degree and will reduce the jitter to only 50%. Now you load the system onto a hard disc and then into RAM where it is heavily buffered, the process involves reclocking the data stream as it is written to disc. Let's say you can reduce the jitter by 90%. So now you only have 0.1X as your jitter being recorded. Now you playback and because the jitter is low you only reduce the remaining jitter by 20%. The result is playback that was original 50% of the original jitter vs the copy that is now only 8% of that original jitter. These are, of course, hypothetical numbers, but the principle is sound (no pun intended). This is one of the few areas that copies can actually be (not just sound) better than originals.