CDR Better than original ?

[Burto]

Hi,

Searching the web I found that some are saying CDRs sound better than the original recordings.

Also make of blank disk can also make a difference (black disks are the best ?)

Will experiment but any opinions/experience would be helpful. Apparently the pre recorded disks are pressed and with a slow burn improvement can be made.

 

[ReValveiT]

No.

 

[abacus]

Its all digital data so there will be no difference.

Hope this helps

Bill

 

[matthewpiano]

What isn't in the original disc can't magically be added.

 

[nopiano]

I've not heard this for quite a while but recall it being more than what it appears. I recall the belief was that rerecording might enable glitches that occur when played back in real time to be corrected. But I'm racking the old memory banks and can't be bothered to google

 

[matthewpiano]

...but then when you play the CD-R copy back in real time, surely there is going to be the same possibility of errors/glitches occuring then?

I've heard this said to be an advantage of ripping CDs to a hard drive on the basis that there is then no reliance on the normal error correction needed when reading an optical disc but I'm even very dubious about how much that would affect the end sound.

 

[MajorFubar]

If there was some re-EQ'ing to make say a dull CD sound a little brighter (or vice versa, etc) I guess you could argue that the CD-R sounds better, but a direct copy should be exactly that: a direct copy.

 

[Covenanter]

The thread just leaves me depressed!

Chris

 

[Vladimir]

I also heard CD-RW is even better. Captures the details in harpsichord recordings almost as good as vinyl.

 

[manicm]

CD-Rs have rarely sounded better than the originals in my experience, and yes were also dependent on the blank discs used - some definitely sounded better than others.

 

[matthewpiano]

The thread just leaves me depressed!

Chris

Have to say I'm increasingly with you there Chris.

 

[aob9]

That doesn't make sense. Digital is Digital. That's like saying a jpg looks better on an SD card than onboard memory. Some of the conversations on hifi forums are distressing. I sould apologize for keeping it going. I'm off to Tapeheads.

 

[manicm]

That doesn't make sense. Digital is Digital. That's like saying a jpg looks better on an SD card than onboard memory. Some of the conversations on hifi forums are distressing. I sould apologize for keeping it going. I'm off to Tapeheads.

When it comes to copying music CDs to another disc, no, digital is not just digital. You actually cannot make an exact copy of a CD using a computer because the music is first ripped to WAV and then these WAV files are burned onto a disc. Remember an original music CD contains data in PCM format.

 

[fr0g]

That doesn't make sense. Digital is Digital. That's like saying a jpg looks better on an SD card than onboard memory. Some of the conversations on hifi forums are distressing. I sould apologize for keeping it going. I'm off to Tapeheads.

When it comes to copying music CDs to another disc, no, digital is not just digital. You actually cannot make an exact copy of a CD using a computer because the music is first ripped to WAV and then these WAV files are burned onto a disc. Remember an original music CD contains data in PCM format.

Completely and utterly incorrect statement..

WAV is simply one of the types of PCM (as is AIFF). It is digitally represented music. It can be losslessly converted to a number of formats and back again if you wish. At every stage you can return the exact same data as on the CD, assuming it isn't scratched.

 

[matt49]

Completely and utterly incorrect statement..

WAV is simply one of the types of PCM (as is AIFF). It is digitally represented music. It can be losslessly converted to a number of formats and back again if you wish. At every stage you can return the exact same data as on the CD, assuming it isn't scratched.

Indeed.

WAV is the file format in which PCM is encoded on a CD. When you rip a CD to disk, you can rip it in WAV or any of the other formats. A WAV rip will be bit-for-bit identical to the data on the CD. Rips to other lossless formats (AIFF, ALAC, FLAC) will be different only insofar as they use different methods of packaging the data into a smaller space on disk. However, they don't change or remove or degrade any of the musical information.

To the OP: if it's genuinely the case that a CDR copy sounds better than the original CD (which I find extremely hard to believe), then the CD player is not working to spec.

Matt

 

[chebby]

Why bother ripping a CD to another CD?

I thought the whole point was to rip to an HDD so the player can be removed from the system, the actual CDs can go into storage and free up living space, music can be controlled/streamed via convenient objects like smartphones and tablets with far better user interfaces than a CDP remote handset, collections can be backed up for safekeeping and be instantly available/accessible etc.

Copying to another CD seems pointless. (Especially as the dyes used in recordable CDs are nowhere near as long lived as 'proper' CDs.)

I don't see how a copy on a recordable CD can be any 'better' or 'worse' than the source disk. I'd like that explained (if an explanation is possible) because I am baffled by the idea.

I can accept that (with some CDs) a bit perfect rip - employing error correction - can give better results than a CD player that has to fix errors 'on the fly'. A rip can have multiple attempts (and at much slower speeds if necessary) to fix a 'marginal' CD whereas a CD player can't. But in my experience a well looked after collection (that has never had it's playing surfaces touched or marked) won't throw up many such examples.

 

[nopiano]

The thread just leaves me depressed!

Chris

Have to say I'm increasingly with you there Chris.

. Sorry if I poured fuel on your fire, there!
"However, in most cases, a copied CD sounds better than the original even if it is only true for certain tracks. A freshly burned CD-R has often far better articulated pits than a pressed one. Just like with vinyl pressings, the stampers wear out and the record company is not always willing or finacially able to replace them every x-number of CDs. Worse, many times CDs are re-issued using old worn stampers. Freshly cut CDs nearly always contain less jitter than mass-duplicated commercial versions." This is extracted from here:-http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/eac/eac_3.html "Original (pressed) CD (Two Against Nature - by Steely Dan) - no C2 errorsC1 Errors: Average (.09) Maximum (15) Total (263) Quality Score (98) CD (burned) on MOFI Ultradisc Gold CD-R - no C2 errorsC1 Errors: Average (.03) Maximum (9) Total (95) Quality Score (99) The burned CD is actually better than the original! I was not aware that they are the "inferior" MAM-A, but I'm sure you've done your homework. Unfortunately, as you say, they are only rated for 74 minutes. But if you say the Mitsui Gold Ultra II were better, I'd sure like to hear that!" This extract from here:-http://www.stereophile.com/content/highest-quality-cd-rsburning-software-1 Now, I am sure someone will remind me that you can find the moon is made of cheese on the web, but I did recall the OP's point, and it was common currency in its day, just as many believe ripping CDs gives better sound - such as Linn. I thought we knew by now that digital does not all sound the same, even if we do need to add distortion to make it sound analogue!

 

[nopiano]

Apologies that the formatting seems to gave gone AWOL in my post above. It wasn't what I wrote, in layout...

 

[Thompsonuxb]

This is interesting a few months ago I would have said you cannot improve on the original, but after the compression/loudness thread I have changed my mind - you can improve on an original, even by only turning its equ level up by a few notches.

so yes you can improve on a original recording.

 

[aob9]

you can improve on an original, even by only turning its equ level up by a few notches.

so yes you can improve on a original recording.

Isn't that subjective.???

 

[ReValveiT]

It's shocking how much utter horse plop still makes its way around in HiFi circles...

Stop it, just stop it.

 

[andyjm]

While many of the posts on this forum about the impact of digital sampling on audio are complete claptrap, in best mythbusters tradition, there is possibly a small grain of truth underlying this claim. Just to be clear before we start, I think the whole rip a CD to a hard disk, then burn a CD-R to improve the sound quality is nonsense. However....

If the CD is of poor quality, it could benefit from a multi pass rip where a PC has a number of goes at trying to read errored data off the CD. This is not an option for a CD player which plays a CD 'on the fly'. The data (now error free on a hard disk) can be burnt to an orangebook CD-R (which if stored as a datafile) has a much higher degree of error correction than a redbook CD. You couldn't play it on a CD player, but you would have more accurate data than a single pass CD player could retrieve that you could then play on another PC.

Like I said, true, but given the extremely low error rates I achieve when ripping CDs (I cant remember the last CD I ripped that didn't pass the 'accuraterip' CRC check on the first pass), I think this is yet another case of a scientific fact being twisted to justify the subjective experience of a bunch of audiophools with too much time on their hands.

 

[cheeseboy]

When it comes to copying music CDs to another disc, no, digital is not just digital. You actually cannot make an exact copy of a CD using a computer because the music is first ripped to WAV and then these WAV files are burned onto a disc. Remember an original music CD contains data in PCM format.

no it's not.

When you copy a cd using a computer it takes the cd as an image, an iso - which is a bulk dump of the disc as data. the computer doesn't know, and doesn't care what's on the disc. It then burns that image back to the cd. Wav doesn't even come in to it.

Even if you did rip it wav then burn it again, it would still be an exact copy, but just to re-iterate, copying a cd, it does not convert it and rip it wav and then burn it.

 

[cheeseboy]

A freshly burned CD-R has often far better articulated pits than a pressed one.

even if that were true, it would still not make any difference to the data. You talk about the jitter, but say for example if we did rip the disc then it's still the same data without any loss.

In order for the quality of the music to change, something would have to physcially alter the data on the disc, which without putting in to something like audicity/cubase/protools or whatever, it's just the same.

 

[MajorFubar]

That doesn't make sense. Digital is Digital. That's like saying a jpg looks better on an SD card than onboard memory. Some of the conversations on hifi forums are distressing. I sould apologize for keeping it going. I'm off to Tapeheads.

When it comes to copying music CDs to another disc, no, digital is not just digital. You actually cannot make an exact copy of a CD using a computer because the music is first ripped to WAV and then these WAV files are burned onto a disc. Remember an original music CD contains data in PCM format.

If you first rip it as WAV and reburn it as a CD, there might be minute differences to the new CD structure. For example there can be differences of a few samples each way between how different CD drives read and interpret track-splits, also you might burn the new CD with different inter-track gaps (which is more noticeable). But the data that makes up the music will be copied bit-perfectly and will be identical. There are no vaguaries like those associated with analogue copying. Feel free to prove it to yourself by ripping a song from any commercial CD as a WAV, burning it to a fresh CD without any modification, ripping that and checking that they they null each other when you align the rips absolutely precisely sample-for-sample in Audacity and invert one. (Any DAW will do this, but Audacity is free to download and is good enough.) Rest assured, they will null each other. Absolutely perfectly.