Do CD-R's sound the same as originals

Thanks...great response. Well....my brother (in LA..studio guy..and a reviewer for a high end mag) purchased the Phillips dual tray audio cd burner yesterday. He called me this am from cell phone and sounded like he just had an epiphany! Although he has had trouble with the sound quality from CDR's, he was impressed with the Phillips audio burner component. He claims that it is as close to a perfect duplicate as he has ever heard. He claimed that there is a bit of crisp harshness, that the vocals seem to not lay back behind the speakers as much as before, and lacked a bit of the air that the original had. He concluded that the audio burner was "damn close" to the original and is great for 99% of humanity. He originally planned to keep the Phillips only if it "made sonically perfect copies", however, he is considering keeping the unit because it is, "close enough" given the savings. He also said that the Phillips unit was built like a typical crappy low-fi electronics. He is going to have to send my some copies so that I can hear for myself, but I'm impressed.

Ramstl: Other than occasionally Kevin Halverson, you won't find any experts here...but you knew that already, didn't you?

Mfgrep: So far, I hear exactly the same thing your brother heard, from the CD-R disc that Ejlif made with his Meridian transport/Tascam CD-R machine. I also hear EXACTLY the same thing with the copies I make with my $89 computer CD-RW. I don't know what all the fuss is about. They ARE NOT a truely perfect copy, but of course they suffice (I never said they didn't). That's why I use CD-R's, and am happy with them. THEY SUFFICE, AND THEY NEED NOT BE UNIQUIVACALLY PERFECT TO SERVE THEIR PURPOSE...................To all the doubters, there's ZERO point in arguing WHY they "REALLY ARE" a "perfect" copy, because those of us who have a decent system, trust our ears (and can hear 20 kHz), KNOW what we hear....DAD-GUMMIT!!! There's no need to waste your time here anymore, YOU CAN'T TELL US THAT WE DO NOT HEAR, WHAT WE (and anyone else who listens, in my system's case) DO IN FACT HEAR!...........Isn't it all really about the music anyway? I thought it was. Apparently you guys have never heard that expression before...

I'm not sure anyone else feels like any fuss is being made - this seems to be a conversation amongst several people interested in understanding what the results and effects of CD copying are and, more importantly, what the critical aspects of the process are for getting "acceptable" performance. I don't think anyone has tried to convince anyone else of what they're hearing for quite a while in this thread. I'm certainly not trying to convince anyone here that they're not hearing what they claim. In fact, I absolutely believe everyone who says they hear degradation. I'm interested in hearing about the types of degradation they're hearing so I can go back and listen more specifically for myself. What I'm really interested in is in trying to understand why they're hearing degradation. It's possible that it's fixable immediately, and it's also possible that, while it may not be immediately fixable, we'll collectively understand what it is we're waiting for that will fix the problem. In the meantime, it seems that one thing that is indisputable is that it is possible to make bit-perfect copies of CDs to CDRs, and yet you keep saying they're not. I'm having trouble understanding what you're basing that on - If I can read and write 650MBytes of data and calculate a checksum across them all and do this over and over and over and repeatedly get the same checksum which has, literally, one in many billions of a chance of matching without the data being exactly the same, and since I do it over and over and over and get the same answer, and the odds of that are therefore billions to the N power - at what point does it become illogical to argue that they're not "truly perfect"? They're not truly perfect from CD to CDR because the way the bits are physically stored is different, but from an information standpoint they're identical. To state that there are no "perfect" copies in the face of these odds doesn't seem to do anything but attempt to cloud the discussion indefinitely, and it would be much more interesting to discuss what is making the CDR copies sound different to those who are experiencing the degraded sound. -Kirk

Kthomas: YES you are sure any fuss is being made, or you wouldn't be disputing one point of view over another. Look, you are being closed minded, to my point of view, and my experience. Read above what my experience was. I don't care if you claim you can make a "perfect copy" 100 vigintillion times over (and you can look that number up), I still had trouble just getting ONE image file without a glitch, from a Mobile Fidelity Gold CD. The glitch showed up in the same place in the same track "time after time after time", as I read the CD over and over, and made image files that were "bit perfect". It then proceeded to write this glitch onto two separate CD-R's, from two separate image files. My gripe? My highend CD player played the original CD many times over, WITH NO GLITCH WHATSOEVER. It WAS a read error, and it made the CD-R copy NOT indentical to the original....besides the fact that the rest of the CD-R was more dynamically compressed, more distorted, and had much less air in the top octave...than the original. THOSE LATTER ASPECTS HAVE OCCURRED EVERY TIME I'VE MADE A CD-R (and also thusfar in my comparison with Ejlif's CD-R, copied on a Meridian/Tascam setup), even when the "data" DOES get "copied perfectly". ALL I'VE DONE IS DEFEND MY POSITION IN ANSWER TO THE ORIGINAL QUESTION AT THE TOP OF THE THREAD. And that is what I consider to be FACT: that a CD-R does NOT sound exactly like the original, and DOES INDEED seem to lose data in the process of creating one, in some fashion. IF YOU'RE SO INTERESTED IN WHAT WE FEEL THE SONIC DIFFERENCES ARE (between original and CD-R copy), WHY AREN'T YOU RETAINING THIS INFORMATION AS YOU READ IT? I've stated it over and over again, I don't know how many times. Just read what I say above. Others are even in agreement with me. I'm not saying that there aren't other factors at play with CD-R's, but please don't tell me this debate is about "data", because it's only "data" BEFORE it gets READ the first time. After that, it's a PROCESS called digital audio...To argue any other view than that is utter foolishness. AND WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THE SONY-PHILLIPS CONGLOMERATE EVEN WANTS PROS IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY TO MAKE "ABSOLUTELY PERFECT COPIES", USING THE CD-R PROCESS...much less CONSUMERS?? Can you be that naive, to think that "there ought to be a simple/easy way to make unquestionably perfect copies of CD's"? GET REAL!