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Can the copy sound better than the original?

Ridiculous question on the surface, I know. Here are the particulars:
I burned a copy of Mike Patton's "Mondo Cane" to listen to at work. I played the cd-r to verify that it was functional and it seems to sound significantly better than the original manufactured disc. More cohesive performance, better detail in inner voices, a sense of being in the space with the performers, and soundstage depth that is unusual for this system. Nonsense, right? I will state upfront that I have no affiliation with Memorex whatsoever. The cd-r I burned was a Memorex
"Black" cd-r. The only explanations I can come up with are that a) there was some compression in the transfer into i-tunes b) there is something about the way a laser might read a cd that would cause a typical silver cd to reflect garbage light onto the laser, whereas a black cd has less spurious reflective emission. Anybody else care to try this and confirm/de-bunk my perception?
ths364
djohnson54
396 posts
 
I know this has been argued endlessly but I don't find the idea that farfetched. The issues with reflected light are one possibility but consider also that, during the copy process, the CD has gone through the error correction process of the CD drive. If the burned CD-R needs less error correction AND the error correction algorithm in your CDP is audible at some level then ...

Dick
almarg's avatar
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almarg
9,670 posts
 
See this thread, in which the same question was discussed. The bottom line, IMO: Yes, it is quite plausible, and is even expectable depending on the media and the player. The quotes contained in my post that is linked to in that thread present several reasons, involving interactions that can occur between the mechanisms that track and read the disk and other parts of the player, resulting in jitter and noise issues.

Regards,
-- Al
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kijanki
4,432 posts
 
Ths364 - It can be also, that many ripping programs like EAC or MAX go many times over the same sector until they obtain proper checksum. CDP cannot do that, working in real time, (at least most of them) and interpolates missing samples. That way CDR can become better (repaired) version of poorly printed (or scratched) CD.

Cross Interleave Reed Solomon Code used with CDs can error correct scratches along the disk up to about 4mm and then for scratches between 4-8mm it interpolates. Above 8mm it quits (pops).
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drubin
3,275 posts
 
Seems to me these would all be reasons why music servers should outperform CD players, since the ripping process delivers this performance increase. Better yet: download the music file. Right?

And then there is the issue of black CD-Rs, CD treatments, the SHM CDs from Japan, CD mats, and so forth. Shouldn't all the benefits reported for these tweaks be automatically present in a properly downloaded file?
meiwan
399 posts
 
I tried playing CD's on my iMac through a DAC. Didn't sound very good. Burned the CD to the iMac hard drive. Played the burned version and it sounded considerably better.

Lesson, clearly the transport makes a huge difference. The copy is hopefully an exact duplicate of the original, so it's tough to focus on that.

Separately, depending on the recording, a lesser copy may actually sound better if it looses some of the digital hash. Doesn't mean its better, just sounds better.
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