Burning better CD-Rs from Mac/rec eternal burner


Before you jump on me about searching the archives, let me say that I have done so exhaustively and have not found what I need.

I want to burn a compilation CD for taking to audio shows and meetings, but I am always disappointed with the sound quality of CDs I burn from iTunes on my MacBook Pro. I rip with Apple Lossless, burn at slowest possible speeds, and have all the settings where they should be as far as I know, but the quality is still inferior. Good enough for the car, good enough to give to non-audiophiles, but sufficiently inferior to the original CD that I would not want to use them on a really good system. (Short story: a guy came to my house a few months ago to listen to some speakers I was selling. He brought a compilation CD he had made. The sound was really mediocre. Over his mild objection, I put on an original CD and he was stunned at the improvement.)

I know many of you do make compilation CDs and then there is the whole copies-sound-better-than-originals camp, so there must be a better way. Is the secret to get an external CD burner? If so, which? Plextor was a favorite, but they are out of that business.

Dan
Ag insider logo xs@2xdrubin
Yes, well, the only thing that's difficult is getting good results for the discerning listener. At least that's been my experience, hence this topic.
Dan, could you tell us if you have experimented with any file type other than Apple Lossless? I know that mathematically, Lossless is supposed to be identical to WAV. However, listening to Lossless files makes me grind my teeth they sound so inferior to WAV. I can only surmise my Marantz Sa11S1 reconstructs the audio files differently if Apple is correct about Lossless being truly lossless. However, I heard things the same way on less resolving players than the Marantz as well. "Apple Lossless vs. WAV" is a topic that's been covered over at AudioAsylum as well.
Well the results I get are no different in sound quality than the original Drubin.
"Lossless" is just a word used by Apple to name their highest quality codec. It's still compression and there will always be a degree of "loss" audible, especially when converting back to an audio stream for a CD played on a high fidelity sysem.

I use Apple Lossless to rip and then burn audio CD copies for my kids (they tend to destroy originals) but for my own music I stick to EAC (which uses WAV files) with great success. I don't see why EAC shouldn't work on a Mac running XP.