do burnt CD copys sound as good as originals?

Shadorne, if you'd care to do some reading, Genesisloudspeakers.com has a twenty four page technical article on this issue. Or you can just Google "White paper on black cds," it will be the first hit to come up. The author goes into rather exhaustive detail, so I'm not going to try and paraphrase his theorems. Whether you buy it or not, it's interesting reading.

Could sound better or worse depending on the relative quality of the two physical discs - but chances are you will not hear much difference - unless one disc is poorly made, scratched, off-center, warped, etc. Such discs would create higher error rate and jitter maybe?? I get a lot of transport noise from some discs - burned copies do not exhibit such noise.

I must say I can't hear a difference either, i just thought it was my poor hearing. A different issue is CD life. I have heard origonals have a longer life expectancy than copies. This is due to the less permanent method of burning CDs in a computer, any thoughts?

Photon6 and Kmcarty,

Thanks for the link. I enjoyed reading the Genesis article. Clearly the author has encountered some kind of transport/burning problem. As the author states....according to the "data" it is identical, however, it sounds different => this can only be due to a problem reading certain types of "burned" disks on the transport being used.

Some early CD players had trouble with some types of "burned" discs and some lasers had trouble with some types of dyed discs- so this is entirely possible. Also, as the author states no compression or software errors/bugs can occur in the copy process.....in which case the copy is no longer a true copy. Given the unreliability of windows software and hardware compatibility, the complexity in some "burn" programs and the general infinity of permuations of hardware/software...it seems possible that Genesis ran foul of some technical compatibility problems somewhere.

However, these findings do not negate that a correctly executed digital copy of data should be identical to the orginal data...it just means that some sets of hardware/software do not work properly together as they should.

Rather than blame all CD copying as a process fraut with some errors (patently untrue) it would be only fair to conclude that the author (and others) have encountered hardware/software bugs or compatibility problems somewhere in the reproduction chain. (not unlikely given the myriad of possible hardware/software combinations)

So how do you burn CD's "bit-for-bit" on a Windows system without compressing?