Why does the recording sound better?

I have seen "green mats" around $35 that you place on top of your CD that are claimed to improve the sound of your CD by allowing the laser in your CD drive to improve the focus of the laser and not shine through the CD, maybe this is why my lightscribe disk backup sounded better. Is this snake oil or is there anyone out there who has used such a tweak with success? Lastly, I inspected my CD collection and some of the disks are black and you could not see through them when held up to the light, I was able to clearly see through the other disks in my collection with the LightScribe copies being less transparent. Thoughts - Thanks! Rpg

There is little doubt. What you are hearing is differences in jitter. The master clock, whether in the CD player or the computer or device is the most important part of any audio system. The master clock in the CD transport is affected by the variations in the pits on the media.

The best way to reduce this jitter is to rip your disks using a good tool like dbpoweramp for PC or XLD for Mac and then playback using good software like Amarra or Pure Music.

If you MUST play CD's on a transport, then rewrite them using a Plextor USB drive and use good media like Mitsui gold audio master. Clean and treat the media with a good treatment before writing it. You can use a mat to keep the disks from resonating as it spins. All of these things make the copy sound even better than the original, but it will never be as good as playing the file back on a good computer system from a SS disk.

It's time to come into the 21st century. We dont spin CD's anymore in this century.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

I have also always found that a copy I have made of a CD sounds better than the original, both being played in the same CD player. One explanation that has been put forward for this is that the quality of the CD's made now are better than the quality of commercial CDs made even just a few years ago.