Preference for listening to music?

Good burner:

No! sorry!!

There are harmonics issues, supersonic noise and many other things.
And all that alter these 0 and 1!!

Come to my home with an original Cd and its computer copy an i will prove you by listening in 10 seconds!

Yes, so consider that the integrity of the musical message (0 and 1) is not respected
!!
I'll get more precise info on this issue, but when you hear the difference, it's obvious

Another interesting thing about burn cds : when you record at high speed on the audiophile recorder, the sound is less good than at normal speed…like for tape !!


Here are a few technical answering elements from sites found on the net, about computer sound:


“Why are plug-in computer cards so jittery? Does this affect my work with the cards?
Most computer-based digital audio cards have quite high jitter, which makes listening through them a variable experience. It is very difficult to design a computer-based card with a clean clock--due to ground and power contamination and the proximity of other clocks on the computer's motherboard”

“I've also observed that a 4X-speed SCSI-based CDR copy sounds inferior to a double-speed copy and yet again inferior to a 1X speed copy.”

Here's the inside view of a serious CD player (mark Levinson)

http://www.audioclub.it/h/audio/prodotti/MARKLEVINSON/PICSML /ML_390Sopen.jpg

read up
jitter is one explanation
all the people who come to my house and make BLIND test feel a hude difference.
Placebo?

oliverstoned wrote: ...it's at the point it runs off the line in the highs

A copied CD literally doesn't do that, unless it's been converted to MP3 between ripping and copying.

On any decent drive the actual data on the CD will be exactly the same - the only issue is that because the tracks aren't done the same way it's harder to read for the CD player so some mistakes might be made. However, there aren't any mistakes on the CDR (if it's done properly), just in the reading. Plus CDR, especially cheap CDR, degrades rather quickly.

If an original CD has the data 10001011110100100011 (etc. etc.), the copied CD will also have the data 10001011110100100011 (etc. etc.). Where's the distortion introduced?

That's the point I was raising. We're not talking about playback, but the copying of 0's and 1's. If a cd burner on a PC "mis-copies" then wouldn't any software it was copying crash ?. Now, if you're talking about a Hi-Fi cd player misreading these cheaply produced standard cdr's then that's a different matter.
      

The explanation is in the software.

As goose says, a CD burner puts 1s and 0s onto a CD - it doesn't introduce them or remove them; it CAN'T. Sound data is like any other data; just streams of 1s and 0s. It CANNOT change if it is directly copied, but it can if it is in any way manipulated.

When you burn an audio CD, you rely on a variety of algorithms to convert from one format to another in the burning software (e.g. WAV to CDA). If you do a "straight copy", you are still relying on the software to extract the data and put it back together exactly as it found it - which it might not, depending on the algorithm used.

Although I do not know how every CD burning package performs it's tasks, I have noticed that most seem to create a temporary "spool" file on the hard disk. This suggests to me that it writes the audio data to a proprietary encoded file (changes the data) before encoding it to CDA (changing it again).

A high end burner, in all likelihood, uses either a highly efficient algorithm in it's firmware, or none at all (which is best of all, as it would leave the data fully unchanged). I don't know enough about the mechanics of CD Burners, but I do understand software and data to a reasonable extent!

Plausible?

 

I never listen to MP3. First of all I prefer to have the CD myself (we have a huge collection of CDs and vinyls home), and second I don't like to listen to just one song taken out of context; I either listen to the whole album or not at all. I am not interested in ephemerae.

Edited by BaldJean