Why does the copy sound better than the original

12-09-12: Geoffkait
I suppose one might ask, how can you say the differences were "extremely small," just barely perceptible on certain notes, yet in the same breath say the original was "clearly better than the copy." The results do not appear to support such a conclusion at all.

There is no inconsistency there, Geoff. What I was trying to say would have come across more clearly if after the words "clearly better than the copy" I had added the words "upon very careful comparison." And I'll add now that while the differences were small, and a lot of the time there was no difference, ALL of the perceivable differences were in the direction of being better on the original.

Marqmike, thanks very much for the kind compliment.

Regards,
-- Al

Al,

Thanks for taking the time to do the CD copy to original CD listening test experiment.
Jim

Al, i hate judge before all the facts are in but it looks to me like "the copy sounds better than the original" will be joining the illustrious ranks of the Mpingo disc, Shakti Stone, Intelligent Chip, Schumann frequency generator, CD demagnetization, PWB Silver Rainbow Foil, Cream Electret, WA Quantum Chips, wire/fuse directionality, tube dampers, crystals, Green pen, destat guns and ionizers for CDs and cables, contact enhancers, ERS paper, you know, insofar as it's apparently impossible to get unanimous agreement not only for how they work but whether the damn things even work at all!

One more thing I should add to the description I provided yesterday of the experiment I performed:

While for several reasons I had high confidence that the copies I created contained bit-perfect replicas of the digital data on the original CD's, to be completely certain of that I put one of the tracks I used in the experiment through some software which computed what are known as MD5 checksums of that data.

As expected, the MD5 checksums of the original and the copy matched perfectly, which confirms that all of the approximately 300,000,000 bits of that track were identical on the original and the copy.

Regards,
-- Al

Al wrote,

"While for several reasons I had high confidence that the copies I created were bit-perfect replicas of the digital data on the original CD's, to be completely certain of that I put one of the tracks I used in the experiment through some software which computed what are known as MD5 checksums of that data.

As expected, the MD5 checksums of the original and the copy matched perfectly, which confirms that all of the approximately 300,000,000 bits of that track were identical on the original and the copy."

Al, I kind of hate to bring this up, and certainly appreciate your due diligence, but doesn't the perfect bit to bit matching of the original and the copy bring into question why you heard differences between the original and the copy? Perhaps you can think of a scientific reason(s) why you heard differences when there were no differences between the data.....