CD Copies...why do they sound worse?


I had a theory that I haven't discarded yet that not all CD blanks are equal in terms of composition. Yes, they all are made of aluminum and polycarbonate, and when you burn a CD you are creating small holes, or dents in the blank. There is the red book standard that must be adhered to, but as in anything else, I'm sure there are better grades of aluminum and poly available, you get what you pay for. Since the laser reads the digital stream by optically scanning the surface of the CD and interpreting either a one or zero, you'd think it's a go/no-go operation. The original and copies do not sound the same, even to the uncritical ear. I thought for a while it may have had something to do with the relative quality of the CD blanks I was using to copy, in other words, the pressing plants simply use a better grade of master CD's. My friend has a contact and we were able to acquire bulk CD blanks from Saturn Disc that makes CD's. No difference, copies still aren't right. I guess we can eliminate the CD blanks for now. Here's where things get a little outside normal thinking in my twisted logic: we know there are error detection and correction schemes used in intrepreting the data on the CD, employed when the bit being read isn't immediately recognizable to the player. Is it possible the home-made copy that was burned using a cheap consumer grade burner, contains more errors? Are the pits burnt in the CD either irregular in shape or depth? Does the laser in these consumer grade CD burner introduce errors? If so, the EDAC is pretty busy, and doesn't always get it right, which would explain a general lack of quality due to latency delays in the data stream while the EDAC does it's work, and in the process is bound to mis-interpret zeros and ones, there is no 100% accurate EDAC. To me, this is a good place to start in terms of understanding the obvious differences in sound quality.
jeffloistarca
How can this possibly confuse you. The sound of the recorded CDR played back on the same CD player sounds better than the sound of the original CD that the CDR was recorded on played on the same CD player. I know digital is just 1s and 0s how can it sound diffrent, it does and not by a small margin either. I don't know the scientific reasons behind this, but I do know what my ears tell me. This is definately the kind of diffrence you would be able to hear on a player as fantastic as the Meridian 508.24 (good choice)
Ejlif, I only have a second, but I want to clarify something real quick. It appears I may of come off as one of those that think highend is a joke; that couldn't be farther from the truth!!!! ...this is why I own a 508.24. I was one that wasted my time arguing with the yahoo's on audioreview.com about cables, I have heard the difference, heck my wife hears the difference and she could care less!
Vinyl is a totally different medium, and sounds better because there is both more dynamic and more tonal resolution stored in, and passed through the fromat. Not because of the material it's stored on, for example. Let's just keep this on CD-R's, if we could. Ejlif says he doesn't know why a CD-R would afford better performance, that "it just does". If we wanted to know why that were true (if it is) we'd have to ask several of the best designers in the field, and not just speculate about the "why". There are complex issues that would need to be dealt with, about how CD's get read in the first place. You should all read what Harly has to say about CD playback, in the back of TCGTHA.
Here's a case where it's not necessarily so that "bits is bits". It is true that the transcription (CD-R) cannot be more accurate than the original. But even if the transcription is identical to the original, the playback machine may read the original aluminum pitted disk more or less accurately than it reads the dye marks on a CD-R. Compounding that is the likelihood that the CD-R will have transcription errors and that all CD players have built in error correction coding processing that is used to detect and interpolate through, if not correct errors... too bad that CD players don't have a little instrumentation readout to give some idea of the level of BER being experienced. Looking at the BER for a stamped CD vs the CD-R transcription would give some quantitative clues about what's really going on.