do burnt CD copys sound as good as originals?

Seandtaylor99,
I was wondering the same thing myself. What if my CD Drive in the PC is reading the disc and coverting to analog, transmitting that over the little chincy 3 wire (but totally appropriate for this application of course ;) ) left and right audio cable down to the sound card...and what if that is doing an ADC conversion on that before it gets to the HDD?
...the other day i was having some issues setting up an older PC for my son's iPod, and when I stuck a cd in to burn it, it went very fast (the little pending and complete icons ripped thru in sequence)...in fact it did nothing at all..it did go to gracenote and read tht correct cd info, but i suspect that is all it did: read the header. The digital audio data was not imported.

I did some digging and got to a selection in windows NT 2000 that asked if i wanted to convert the cd to analog...i tried that no good either....but this is what led me to question the possibility of the machine going thru that laborious and noisy path to get the music onto the HDD...
Is there a way to force all digital (ie so the data coming off the CD passes thre the CD-DRIVE over the IDE cable, and into the soundcard...

no for my sons iPod, which will be 128kbps comressed audio files i could care less which way the data gets to the HDD, but for the Squeezebox player, i use EAC and rip to .wav files. IS THERE A WAY TO ENSURE THE DATA REMAINS IN THE DIGITAL DOMAIN(I guess I could unplug the 3 wire cable but that comes in handy for other purposes)?

sorry for the long rant

Does anyone know how to edit songs for burning, such as to clip just a portion
of a song? I want to make some CDs for component evaluations and don't need
entire selections in many cases. Not something you can do in iTunes, is it?

Drubin,
Here are some low cost tools bit there are many...
ACID Music Studio for PC
Garageband for MAC
Audacity for MAC
Cacophony (shareware for MAC also works but has limited functionality)
+...many others... try a google

Generally you need to convert things to a .wav file (PC) or an AIFF file (Mac) and then you can do what you like to make your own mix or "edit" version.

If you are serious then you might want Pro Tools (both MAC and NT Workstation options...this is serious stuff with many plugins that you can purchase)

Once you have a final set of .wav or AIFF files then you can import them into iTunes an burn them with this to an Audio CD....(of course there are also tons of other programs that will burn an audio CD too...so use what is easiest for you)

Just make sure you work in 16 bit 44.1 Khz Stereo files and try to do as little manipulation as possible (even simple volume level adjustments can easily clip some digital data)

One thing you can do is check the data quality to start with....many modern pop CD's are ALREADY HEAVILY CLIPPED (i.e they actually hit the CD upper 16 bit limit or they have been deliberately soft limited to sound as loud as possible). This is easy to see on a PC or MAC screen. Of course, they sound BAD too! Why consumer associations like BBB do not go after an industry which sells CRAP like this is beyond me....perhaps a "Class Action Law Suit" is in order - make them reissue all the clipped CD's in properly mastered versions or refund a portion of the CD cost! (There are thousands out there. My personal survey is that more than one out of every two CD's of pop that I buy today have been deliberately clipped this way - this is criminal!)

And industry professionals wonder why CD sales are plummeting!!!

CD Loudness War

On Linn's website they mention that when burning a cd using a computer, some burning software, according to Linn, 'discards' or 'ignores' the Least Significant Bit, which may degrade the sound. I might have this somewhat incorrect - Check the CD FAQ at linn.co.uk

Having said that, I can hear no difference between the copy and original. BUT my problem is that sometimes my Shanling won't play a perfectly good CD-R (whereas it plays fine on my Linn Classik).

To all those who say that a PC may not perfectly copy a CD I say this:

TREAT IT AS A DATA CD.

On Nero there is an option to make a duplicate of the original CD. This works no matter what is on the original CD, music or data. It is simply a bit for bit copy.

If you rip to the hard drive then burn to a CD it's hard to say for sure what happened to the data, but if you simply duplicate the original CD then you'll get a ...... duplicate.

Seandtaylor99,
Agree. Can you do this such that the duplicate ends up on the HDD (i am thinking in the network file player world)?
I think that is the intent of EAC (exact audio copy). IT reads the PCM (raw) from the disc and if you configure it, will emply error correction as well. I'm very green with EAC and as for help from you masters out there.