2. digital
  3. 1322553479

Can the copy sound better than the original?

Ridiculous question on the surface, I know. Here are the particulars:
I burned a copy of Mike Patton's "Mondo Cane" to listen to at work. I played the cd-r to verify that it was functional and it seems to sound significantly better than the original manufactured disc. More cohesive performance, better detail in inner voices, a sense of being in the space with the performers, and soundstage depth that is unusual for this system. Nonsense, right? I will state upfront that I have no affiliation with Memorex whatsoever. The cd-r I burned was a Memorex
"Black" cd-r. The only explanations I can come up with are that a) there was some compression in the transfer into i-tunes b) there is something about the way a laser might read a cd that would cause a typical silver cd to reflect garbage light onto the laser, whereas a black cd has less spurious reflective emission. Anybody else care to try this and confirm/de-bunk my perception?
ths364

Showing 1 response by audioengr

audioengr
3,282 posts
 
This is not nonsense at all. Years ago I had a CDROM rewriting service to improve on commercial CD quality. If you use Mitsui Gold Audio Master, it will sound even better.

For all of you that dont think jitter is an issue, this is the primary issue with digital audio, and that is the difference you are hearing. The pits in the CDROM are more defined and accurately placed, so it sounds better. Less jitter, better sound quality. No matter how good the transport is, it is still affected by the pit jitter. This is not about errors or error correction. This is a thing of the past. With a clean disk, there are no read errors.

Take it up another notch and use an external CD writer, clean the blank CDROM with a good treatment before writing and mod the external writer to have a Superclock or Ultraclock to reduce jitter even more. Now this is music.

The ultimate is without a doubt computer audio done right. This can achieve levels of jitter not achievable with CD players. This is why I junked my CD transport years ago. Not for the convenience, for the sound quality.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
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