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
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.
Two questions:

Is EAC as good for burning as it is for ripping? Is there a better burning software?

Is an external DVD burner not as good as a external CD burner for burning CDs?