Jea48, Theta Data II, GW labs DSP, Museatex Bitstream, John Wright modded conplete with black gates, Joule LA100 mk III, Atma-Sphere S-30, Coincident Victories. The system is very revealing. The digital front end is ridiculously good for the money. Cables are coincident TRS speaker cable, Purist Museas and Sonoran Plateau for IC's, Harmonic Tech platinum digital IC's.
The reason the duplicate can be better than the source can be found by reading the 6moons article on EAC.
Since cd's are stamped. the lands and grooves representing the data may not be perfect. Jitter is caused in this case and the transport attempts to perform error correction to compensate. The transport can only read what is reflected by the laser. When the pits in the disc are not well defined, the slight timing errors may be introduced into the data stream.
With EAC, the computer reads the data on the disc, determines the improperly defined data, sometimes reads this hard to read data several times to derermine what is there and creates an copy of this data. When burned onto a good disk, the data is written more precisely than say a hundred CD's running through a stamping machine.
It is like trying to read somebodies messy hand writing. If somebody takes the time to copy it word for word neatly, it is easier to read. If it is easier for your transport to read....
As I stated, obvious improvements were made on poorly recorded and average discs. With really well recorded material such as bluenote or chesky, the differences were negligable. Probably only due to the black disk being used for the copy.
