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

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.

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, It's rather playback system has level of jitter X but not the original CD for christ sake.
The recorded CD will than have 1.1X level of jitter played in the same system.
Yes the future high end CD players might have a memory buffer that will store info first and than play. That will take much longer waiting time for the first track to play but Yes the jitter level will be significantly reduced let's say upto 0.05X.

Mara

I've had good results, re-recording CD's on my Alesis Masterlink. There is a significant reduction in error rate. I've heard that there is a new CD burner out that burns more precise bits in the CD, which further reduces the error rate. I believe that Yamaha builds it.

Coming from a "pro" background, I believe that many confuse jitter with error rate. Some audiophile CD manufacturers specify a certain reject percentage for error rate. This said, some CD's that are manufactured end up in the incinerator because they don't meet the specifications. FIM Music is one such companies that take this approach, though most of their catalog (musically) suffers ...

Jacks: That's helpful and clears up some of the confusion. I had confused jitter and error rate. I had been told by someone in the industry of CD mastering and manufacturing that there are clocking errors on the record end that can be reduced by extracting the data and reclocking it. I equated this error to jitter as jitter is a clocking error, but as you have pointed out it is an error rate and not really jitter at all. At any rate, it does seem the case that the error rate can be reduced by making a copy that re-clocks the data, and does so in a superior method to the original. At least this is what I have been told by those in the CD industry.