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

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.

Rives .. reclocking is certainly helpful on playback if the transport does not have a very good clock to begin with. I think jitter is the death of CD sound quality, but I also suspect that manufacturers of cheap CD players use jitter as a kind of "dither" to mask shortcomings elsewhere in their signal path .. I'm certain Marantz does this in their low end players. Jitter adds a warmth and mush which helps out a cheap analog output stage.

As for the error rate there is no way to improve on the error rate you started with since if the bit on the original disk is in error then the information which that bit carried is lost forever.
If this bit error is correctable by the error correction coding then it would be just as correctable on the original disk as on the new disk.
Perhaps you can produce a copied disk which will play better on a marginal transport due to having better reflectivity, but in order to produce this better copy you would have had to play it on a better transport in order to read it.
I maintain that a digital copy can only be the same or worse ... it cannot be better, because it cannot retrieve information lost on the original disk.
I'm not trying to pick an argument, and I am really interested if someone can explain why I'm wrong ... because I have been wrong about audio many times in the past (e.g. digital cables can't sound different ... now I realise they can, and that their are sound explainations as to why).