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I'm not dreaming - these are great CD copies

I have an out of town friend who's given me some CD-Rs that he's made by simply copying music off of red book CDs. The music quality is extremely good - better than I'm used to hearing from my red book CDs. He's not an audiophile and has no idea what format is being utilized e.g. Lossless, etc.
Question - Can you really improve the quality of music from a red book CD by simply copying to some other format? If so, I'm boxing up all 300 of my CDs and asking my friend to copy make copies for me.
rockyboy
aalenik
67 posts
 

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!)    

geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
14,147 posts
 
Now, you two cut that out or I’ll clunk your heads together.
michaelgreenaudio's avatar
michaelgreenaudio
643 posts
 

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

georgehifi's avatar
georgehifi
4,966 posts
 
michaelgreenaudio


OK Michael, forget about the tonal differences, with playback/burn equipment.

From a retail stamped CD, burnt to a blank once or from each burn consecutively say 10 times, which has the least errors on it? The original, first gen burn, or 10th gen burn.

Cheers George
fleschler
766 posts
 
I have a secret from Mr. Record.  Pressed commercial CDs can sound significantly different from one another, even if made at the same pressing plant.  We have found multiple copies that include hotter and less dynamic sound, warmer or cooler sound, thinner and richer sound.  Why, we can speculate that the manufacturing process does not create exact copies of the digital information on pressed discs perfectly. 

Sort of like vinyl pressing differences.  One can hear differences on the same stamper (so many analogophiles think that the hot stamper number is the end all of their search for the best stamper).depending on whether it is an early or late pressing from the same stamper (fresh versus nearly worn out stamper).  There are other variables as well.  

So, within the realm of pressed CDs, there exists differences from the same pressing plant.  The only way one can tell what is the hot or preferred CD is by listening to it.
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