I'm not dreaming - these are great CD copies

I wouldn’t be too terribly surprised if successive copies sounded better and better.

In my experience, many - but not all - CDs can be improved by being copied to CD-R.  Alesis Masterlink does an excellent job, but I've had equally good results using plain old Roxio on a good PC.  For CDs which were produced with great care (e.g. JVC XRCD, Reference Recordings) there is usually no improvement.  For others, it may be minimal or very significant.  I have yet to make a CD-R copy which sounded worse than the original.

Robert Harley hears essentially the same thing.  Neither of us KNOWS why.  Our best mutual guess is that the CD-R copies are clocked more accurately than the originals, reducing jitter.  My guess is that these errors are introduced during then physical production of the disc rather than existing in the digital master.  (I also find the discussion of reading stamped vs dyed discs interesting.)

BTW, I've tried several types of CD-R media.  Verbatim 'Vinyl CD-R' s sound the best to me.

One last thing... Digital copies do not degrade with each generation, as analog copies do.  Reading & writing to magnetic disc is VERY accurate... or computers wouldn't work very well, and couldn't be trusted for business, much less scientific calculation.  Even on PC, a dropped bit is extremely rare.  (Too bad the operating systems & software aren't as reliable!)    

If I may throw my 2 maybe even 3 cents in on the topic. I do a lot of empirical testing for folks (in the home and recording world). Every copy of a recording I receive sounds different from any other copies, and different from the original Red Book version (including remastered and reissues). For those of you saying one is better than the other, you are correct "with your particular system's EQ setting". Every recording has a different and unique original Recorded Code. Every playback system has it's own unique EQ setting. And every audio signal (Audio Code) that travels down an Audio Chain is variable.

No two systems play the same music the same way. It's not so much what is better or worse as much as it is how is your system setup (Tuned) as compared to the next. For example I have several red book, reissues, remasters and copies of the same recordings and they all sound different from each other. However I can tune my system to make them all sound the same depending on how much effort I want to put into the variables.

The hobby of playback has been focusing on the variables of playback for a long time, but it's easy to get caught up in that "One Sound System" mentality and forget how flexible playing back music is. I have faulted the industry of High End Audio many times for wearing their blinders and not giving credit to the rest of audio, that is far more variable.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net