Burned CDs can sound better than the original?

More on CD burning:

It seems that most of us want two functions:

1. Transfer of music LP, etc to the CD medium - we dream about high quality copies. Stereo component player/burners seem to do this the best.

2. CD to CD copying - compilations, or just reburning to get better sound ( I found with my old CD ref player, if it would not read, or skip on the commercial CD, I could burn a copy of the CD and it would both sound better and actually play. Computer burners/software seem to excel at this.

So, it's important, if you want to do both of the above and if you want all the convenience in one component - either a stereo system component player/burner, or at your PC - sit down and make out a budget at the quality level you can afford. (PC = soundcard, SCSI burner and/or reader)

For most of us that don't have $500.00 computer sound cards, not to mention the inconvenience of trying to record into your noisy PC, a stereo component CD-R/CD-RW such as Marantz, etc., is better at copying various sources to a CD than it actually is at CD to CD transfer (it may sound same, but won't necessarily re-clock and improve a cd over the orig. - many recent reviews of these player recorders seem to confirm this).

And the PC CD chain, for me, at least, almost always creates an improved copy going CD to CD if the right SCSI component and software chain is used - markedly so, but even with a soundblaster "Live" card, a PC's copying capabilities from various sources - LP, etc then to CD is limited and not very appealing for the effort.

So for now, we can always solve both issues for the highest quality by adding more components we're not sure we really want!!! Spend Spend Spend - the audiophile quagmire until some genius puts it all in one easy package that's affordable (I'm in the market for the Marantz DR-17 to accomplish all my goals, but that ain't exactly what i consider affordable).

Take Care

Regarding item #2 of my previous post - regarding imperfect pit spiral/alignment on factory CDs. Note: this covers either the case where the hole of the plactic cd is off-center, though the spiral is perfect, or the case where the cd is centered correctly, but the spiral is laid down poorly.

If you want to know how much your cd player is working overtime: I just read an article in Stereophile - Sept 2001 - ref. pg79-80, where Jonathan Scull reviews a $25,000.00 CD transport called the 47 Labs 4704 PiTracer, and, as an aside, is able to note the incredible work the transport mechanism is going through to simply read the cd!

I can imagine that a degradation in sound happens when most cd players mechanically track - I'd love to see him compare a good CD-R's tracking to a factory CD's on this machine!!

In my systems, a properly reclocked/burned cd can equal the effects of a major component upgrade.

Take Care

About 8 or so years ago, I did a test of CD player / Transports and their ability to accurately retrieve what was on the disk. At the time I hadd access to a $40K real-time analyzer and I was trying to prove that all transports were the same and that transport tweaks were useless. Boy was wrong on both occasions. First the CD Red Book standard is not very robust. Second Most CDs don't even meet the minimum standard. Third Even the best transports had read errors, 25 - 40% of the samples on premium transports to more than 95% on mass produced models. I nver thought that the errors could be due to poor track path, but that makes good sense. I'm going to get a new CD burner and Software and do a comparison of burned CDs with stamped ones.

Blues_Man - that's really interesting - I've wanted to hear somebody's experience performing the tests you describe and would be interested in any more detail you might have. A similar test that would be interesting to perform would be somehow analyzing what the transport in a computer CD drive is doing - how many re-reads does it actually have to perform to get the bytes exactly right. It would be interesting to see a histogram of how many times a given track was read - you'd expect a the most at once and a reduced number as the attempts went up. Then it would be interesting to know how many of those read errors could be corrected by the checksums, etc.

I have done comparisons of CDs copied on a computer CD burner and get perfect copies (when it works - occassionally the process fails and spits out the wasted CDR). It's pretty easy to do with the program Audiograbber, available for free. -Kirk

copies give a rolled off sound which many people perfer because their systems are too bright!But in fact there is a loss of some detail and micro-dynamics,thus some say this softer sound is more analog-like.I say given a class" A" system the orig. is FAR better.