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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
drubin
carl109
134 posts
 
"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.
joaco
33 posts
 
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?
xenithon
130 posts
 
"Lossless" is just a word used by Apple to name their highest quality codec

Sorry, but this is rubbish. Lossless is exactly that - zero quality/data/bits etc. is lost in the process. The likes of ALAC and FLAC are lossless and are identical to their uncompressed counterparts (WAV and AIFF). It is like a zip file: compressed the data to a smaller size which then needs to be decompressed to use; but no data is lost anywhere along the way.
drubin OP
3,240 posts
 
That's correct. The only possible caveat is that some people claim the un-compress processing can inflict a sonic toll if, for example, the processor speed on your computer is less than blazing fast. I can't confirm or deny this, but I chose to rip my collection in AIFF just to be safe. As computers get faster, this should become a non-issue -- if it isn't already.
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
3,575 posts
 
Drubin - I use xAct for decoding compressed formats (FLAC etc) and SimplyBurns for ripping/writing. Quality is excellent and you can make compilations (just select "Audio" icon). I was switching ripping format to wav (habit from the past) but gave up and allow Mac's default AFAIK. Both programs are free.
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