CDs sound better when recorded to tapes?

With all the talk about copyright protection on digital discs, it seems to me that one would do fine for all but the most critical listening tests, making cassette tapes on a good machine. The only drawback I see is not being able to easily select individual tracks. Same goes for LP's. Unless you do a lot of remastering (to remove noise) why go through the hassle of digitizing them to write a CD?

Also, if you must copy a CD in digital form, I think that you could redigitize the analog playback of the original disc. If the digital recording equipment is good the digital disc you make will be as good as the playback of the original disc. All this copyright protection stuff is based on the premice that a digital copy must be made without going through an analog step. Not so. Digital to Digital is obviously the simple way to assure quality, but not the only way.

I have found the same thing....i am using a Nak DR- 10; have found the tapes sound better than the cd's.....much more detail in the lower range is revealed.....i have also found that when taping cd's, if the original source material is before the mid '60's, it will sound better on TDK SA w/dolby B than using Maxell XLII w/dolby b...I did an A/B comparison...i taped Reiner conducting Beethoven's 3rd Symphony from an RCA CD on both Maxell XLII and TDK SA... I found that although the Maxell sounded a bit "brighter", there wasn't as much "depth" in the lower registers, as with the TDK.....

The tapes in general, especially the tapes from cd's, sound much more "life-like", more natural, than the cd's.....

How is this "better than CD sound" possible if one is recording from a CD which "doesn't contain all of the information" in the first place? I thought that one can't replace or correct that which isn't there in the first place. Sort of punches a hole into "the source is the most important component" theory.

Bob P.

I've had a similar result with recording to reel-to-reel. Whether it be simply a smoothing of some of the "jaggies", a loss of information elsewhere, or whatever I've found that the reels are slightly more euphonic than the original source. That being said, I rarely use the reels nowadays due to the convenience factor.