How come there is no thread on the RealityCheck?

The fact that the original and the copy sound different is not even debatable. Whether or not the copy is 'better' than the original, is. There is certianly more openess and better depth on the copy.
Stanhifi,
You should post the details of your system; it might give us some idea of why you can't hear what is blatantly obvious to the rest of us (and our non-audiophile friends).

Based upon the rewritten CD's that I have tried, I believe it is just jitter in the pits of the original. If the data is transferred to a computer hard disk and then rewritten by a burner with a precision low-jitter clock and clean power, such as batteries, and the copy is made at low speed to get more accurate pit shapes, then the copy should be significantly better than the original. Makes perfect technical sense to me.

Onhwy61 wrote:
"He doesn't explain why storing the data on a hard drive degrades the sound which leads to question along the line of whether just storing the data in a memory buffer also degrades the sound?"

This makes no sense to me either. Copies from the hard-disk should be every bit as good or better than ones from the original CD.

Audioengr, your lower jitter theory is a reasonable hypothesis, but if jitter from reading the disc is the culprit, this then begs the question of why, given the low cost of memory and computing power, doesn't every player above the entry level read and re-clock the data to the dac thereby eliminating this variable from the equation? This seems like a much more elegant solution to the problem than the meticulous cleaning of discs and then re-writing to a blank CD which has a limited lifetime.

There are numerous high end players that do re-clock the data. I wonder if this re-writing process has any audible effect on their playback?

I am also curious why I never see any test data on the bit stream coming from a transport before and after such treatments are applied. With the right equipment it would be very easy to analyze this stream of bits and see what if any differences there are. It might not tell us what it would sound like but at least it would demonstrate that there are differences.