Copy CD's to CD-R

[JohnB]

I was reading a review of something (don't remember what) in Absolute Sound and Robert Hartey stated that copying CD's to CD-R's improved the sound quality and that this was indisputable. Has anyone tried this? And from a technical standpoint what would cause this? It seems to me a 1 is a 1 and a 0 is a 0 and that any differences would come from the conversion of these 1's and 0's to analog and the analog output. Is the new disc fundamentally different or is it a bit-perfect copy? If a bit-perfect copy how does the sound change?

As a side, has anyone noticed how there seems to be a lot of reviewers with huge egos in the print media (ok maybe not all print media - really just Stereophile and The Absolute Sound)? Don't really get where it comes from and honestly don't know why I continue to subscribe to these magazines given they review very little I can afford and how they review (the music they use) isn't in line with my own taste.

[The Kipnis Studios]

As a recording engineer for Chesky Records, I first started working with CD-Rs in the Summer of 1990, using Yamaha's very first CD-R recorder. It cost a cool $65,000 USD, and blank 63 minute discs were running upwards of $60 USD each.

At that time as now, the finished, recorded pit structure of a CD-R offers superior transitions from land to pit (bump) than on most any pressed CDs (JVC XRCD excluded). Simply put, this produces an optical eye pattern to the laser reading mechanism of a CD player which creates much more accurate square wave patterns that are the analog representation of the digital signal.

It is here where jitter normally sneaks in, because the optical eye pattern must be interpreted by an optical sensor, whose accuracy is directly effected by the clarity of the eye pattern.

Small deviations in timing (jitter) are not recorded nor correted in our single ended 16-bit PCM recording system, and this has been a problem all the way back to 1980, when Phillips and Sony took a few short cuts.

The result is that the same data from a pressed CD will always sound more transparent when dubbed to a CD-R. It is simply a matter a physics, and lack of recording the time signal from the original A/D!

[The Kipnis Studios]

Originally Posted by The Kipnis Studios

As a recording engineer for Chesky Records, I first started working with CD-Rs in the Summer of 1990, using Yamaha's very first CD-R recorder. It cost a cool $65,000 USD, and blank 63 minute discs were running upwards of $60 USD each.

At that time as now, the finished, recorded pit structure of a CD-R offers superior transitions from land to pit (bump) than on most any pressed CDs (JVC XRCD excluded). Simply put, this produces an optical eye pattern to the laser reading mechanism of a CD player which creates much more accurate square wave patterns that are the analog representation of the digital signal.

It is here where jitter normally sneaks in, because the optical eye pattern must be interpreted by an optical sensor, whose accuracy is directly effected by the clarity of the eye pattern.

Small deviations in timing (jitter) are not recorded nor correted in our single ended 16-bit PCM recording system, and this has been a problem all the way back to 1980, when Phillips and Sony took a few short cuts.

The result is that the same data from a pressed CD will always sound more transparent when dubbed to a CD-R. It is simply a matter a physics, and lack of recording the time signal from the original A/D!

HEY! Not a word from anyone about this very important sonic characteristic of optical (and also magnetic) digital media???

[KoalaDummy]

what are you asking ? how to burn

[JohnB]

No, I was just asking about something I'd read about people who would copy their CD's to CD-R's and get better sound quality. I envisioned the problem as something as simple as bit-in-bit-out, that creating the CD-R would not change the bits that make up the data (i.e. music) so how could it sound better in the end. I was thinking of this much like copying any other file that you either get all the bits and it works or you don't and it won't work.

And while it might make a difference it isn't a tweak I'm willing to invest any time or effort in, then again I'm not a tweaker - I just set things up and enjoy.

John

[Butch]

Robert Harley wrote an interesting article about how CD's are produced back in early '08 in the 'Digital' edition of The Absolute Sound. In the article he explained how over time the master die used to press a CD can wear and produce pits with rounded edges causing the pick up laser difficulty in finding exactly where the pits begin and end. This causes the player to use its internal error correction algorithms to kick in. A CD-R does not have problems with pits. He suggested using a free software called Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to burn the CD to your hard drive and then burn it to CD-R.

I have been using EAC for over two years now and I can vouch for it's ability to reconcile all kinds of disc errors including scratched discs. The software will read and reread a track up to 80 times performing error correction to achieve the best bit for bit accuracy possible. I used EAC to make a copy of Pearl Jam 10 which would no longer play in my CD player because of the condition of the disc. Although it took EAC over 10 hours to rip it to my hard drive, it plays perfectly in its CD-R version.