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

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).

Way back when Stereophile ran one of the their first shows at the Waldorf in N.Y. someone by the name of Thomas W. Shea with someone from Audio Alchemy were offering free Cd copies of any Cd you wanted. These copies were always better than the original. It was a case of diminishing returns. The worse the original the better the copy. The better the original the less improvement in the copy.

Unsound: That's the same experience I've had. I can make copies of some pretty poorly mass produced CDs that sound much better once I've made the copy. But take a JVC XRCD--I can't make it any better it only gets worse. I used a Genesis digital lens to read the error rate (at least I think that's what it measures). I would play the original, then make a copy and replay it. For those poor quality original CDs the copy had a lower error rate as measured by the digital lens. Now, the ones that were really good to begin with never improved--usually got worse. I have heard that people have used the Genesis digital lens in front of a CD recorder and gotten similar results. I have not done this as my only CD recorder is the one attached to my computer. Perhaps someone else has tried this experiment. So any ideas to what's going on here?

Rives, I've got an intriguing question here:

What if you simply transfer your CD into simple analogue cassette than you won't realy have any jitter issues will you?