do burnt CD copys sound as good as originals?

Tbg, can you tell us your process and the equipment you use?

Drubin, I do so with some trepidation. But hey, this never stopped me before.

George Lewis is largely responsible for what I presently do although I use only the burner that he apparently drop-shipped and until recently his black cdrs. The lengthy procedure is as follows. Clean original and cdr with RealityCheck ClearDisk or AudioTop digital and treat the original with Jena Labs 3D-X and Nespa it at 120 seconds, burn the cdr on the RealityCheck burner, which has a highly filter power supply, treat the burned cdr with Jena Labs 3D-X and Nespa it, and finally use the Walker Talisman magnet for each playing.

I have done about 200 cds using this procedure, even though I suspect the future will see internet downloading and storage on computer hard drives.

Thanks. I had forgotten that you use a RealityCheck.

Does anyone know how to edit songs for burning, such as to clip just a portion of a song? I want to make some CDs for component evaluations and don't need entire selections in many cases. Not something you can do in iTunes, is it?

This simple editing can be done in iTunes, if you want to go on the cheap. In Get Info : Options, set the Start Time and Stop Time for the excerpt you want. Then run the Convert... command on that track (even if you're not changing the file format) and you'll end up with a copy only containing the excerpt, which you can burn to your demo CD.

The practical answer is that I doubt you'll be able to hear any difference that might pertain while listening in the car (unless you or your friends use lossy compression of the data to produce MP3 disks, or if the original source wasn't a CD but a compressed facsimile).

As far as the answer in theory goes, I've owned and tried a few different component CD-R recorders and blank media, and have found that audible differences certainly do occur. I don't burn copies on a laptop myself, but all the computer-burned copies I have been given by friends which I've later acquired an original CD of have sounded markedly inferior, but I can't say why since I don't know the details of how they were made. I do know that I've never made a copy myself which I felt sounded "better" than an original CD, but a good copy falls below the threshold of reliable distinguishability IMO.

[BTW, about another question raised above, I am sure that no dual-disk CD-R recorders convert to analog and back when dubbing, but the one dual-disk machine I tried -- a "pro" unit like the others I've had -- showed inferior copy fidelity at 1X speed than my single-well machines fed from my outboard transport, and worsened at faster copy speeds.]