Burned CDs can sound better than the original?

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.

Mr Ttathomp you may be absolutely correct. I wanted to try this out first before I said the same thing. I have noticed that many so called "remasterings" are just reducing the dynamics and rolling off the highs. This makes them sound better on systems that can't handle the dynamics or the highs. I was really angered at Blue Note a few years ago put out these RVG remastrings simply trying to cash in on the RVG name with CDs that were already currently available, and to boot at a premium price. These CDs had 90 - 95% of the dynamics removed (measured by one of my technicians using a software analyzer) and severely rolled off highs. To take it one step further, StereoShill praised these recordings, yet in the next issue blatsed all the remastering of rock records with greatly reduced dynamics. When I have time, I'll make some CD-R copies and have them analyzed by one of my techs.

Greg Davis's answer pretty well sums up the potential reasons why a given CD original may sound worse than a CD-R copy: (1) inherent time based error in the data stream, (2) angle deviation causing the reflected laser beam to deviate from its return path through the objective lens, (3) disc eccentricity, in terms of both deviation from circularity of the pit track and and positioning of the center hole, and (4) variation in pit depth, form, or volume.