CD-R vs. original

2 per week - that's quite impressive. What are these? "Mix tapes" (I know you just love that term) from different LPs? How many LPs do you have? Are these individual burns - or are you making say 10 burns of the same digital data assembled on your hard drive?

 

Hi Geoff,

Try again.

Take care,
Jeffrey

 

My suggestion to each and every one of you is - BACKUP EACH AND EVERY DISC YOU ARE EVEN SLIGHTLY FOND OF! Then store them at work, or somewhere else away from where you keep your originals. Ten years ago my CD collection was stolen, and it took a long time to replace 'em. An almost exact copy, is better than nothing at all.

 

Hi Grant,

Which A/D converters are you using and do you really think they're SUPERIOR to the Masterlink's?

Take care,
Jeffrey

 

My God - you are right!! 20 a week is totally mindblowing - maybe that's why my maths was so bad. Thanks mate.

 

I've had or have heard of pretty much everyone getting a bad batch of something or another. I rely on Fuji and Memorex black (I think the newer ones look cool, and they seem to work, so hey, why not) - haven't had problems yet, and I burn a lot since I make music and have to rely on moving stuff from the computer to the stereo system so I can get a better idea as to how everything sounds.

I've had bad experiences with various cheapies (and a certain "vinyl" looking one). I find that most "name brand" CDRs nowadays are usually good. Many previous problems have been fixed. Frankly, just try a bunch of different ones and see what works with your configuration. Some CDRs work well with some burners and not others, some burn speeds and not others. I know people who got the rare bad bunch of Taiyo Yuden Fujis, or, as opposed to my experience, have never had a cheapy go wrong. With so many manufacturers and factors involved, it's really hard to make a straight comparison unless you DIY.

 

The new ones with the black and green label are CMC Magnetics, not held in high regard by the cognoscenti (Grant being the exception ). They don't sound as good subjectively to me either, if you believe in subjective testing. You also have to avoid the newer ones that also look like the old black and gold label Memorexes-- these newer ones say "All Use" on them, they are also CMC Magnetics, call them "fool's gold". You have to hunt for old stock from 2002 of the original 48X Memorex black discs with black and gold labels, they are made by Prodisc. The CMC Magnetics black CD-Rs are actually dark red when you hold them up to the light, when you look at the color of the spindle area. The old good ones look grey.

Unfortunately, they are almost impossible to find now.

 

I do not agree with Grant on the burning speed issue and I've never heard a CD-R that is as good as the original done by computer or stand-alone burner and this includes my Plextor. Real close, but no cigar. I can literally hear sound degredation between 1X and 4X burns no question regarding this and I swear 1X is the closest to the real-deal. As for any CD-R sounding better than the original me thinks those of you that say this are hearing colorations caused by the units/systems you are using and mistaking it for being better.

Personally I've never had a CD go bad on me, but I am well aware that this does happen, but it's more composition materials used in that brief point in time in 1982-83 that caused this problem. Grant has it correct on the CD-R dyes situation though.

Just one deaf guys opinion.

 

Hi Dave, The differences I hear are really subtle, I don't want to over-hype them, around the level of cable swapping (which some people also argue *should* not produce audible differences, a cable is a cable after all), not some huge monumental earth-shattering night-and-day revelation. OTOH, it's these sorts of micro-differences people like us on this board live for.

 

You may not want to jump to that conclusion so hastily. There is a little evidence out there Dave that indicates some science behind the improved sound.

 

Hmm...I have several CDR's that I've copied from at least 2 generations and I can't tell the difference in sound at all. I never really A/B'd them closely but they sound fine. So by "errors", do you mean more chances of drop outs and skipping?

 

Well, perhaps you can enlighten me regarding this new mastering marvel that I'm unaware of. I'm all ears and I've heard all of the "it's the same or better" talk before and still my opinion remains the same after doing the comparisons. Where can I buy it, how much will it cost, and will anyone accept a final diagnosis from me?

PS. In regards to that thread, can't remember what it's called right now, where CardinalFang challanged me to hear the difference between a "high quality" MP3 CD and a WAVE CD. I did it and my answer is still the same. WAVE is superior to MP3 and by no small margin. The high bit-volume MP3 is a lot better than the standard MP3, but it still doesn't touch a WAVE file IMO.

 

I'm not talking about mastering. I'm simply referring to the fact that a CD-R can sound superior to the CD from which it was copied. I know it sounds bloody strange - that a copy can sound better than the original. It can't happen in the analogue world - but it can happen with CDs. There is science at work here - it's not magic.

 

Hi Geoff,

I mainly restore LPs and 45s to CD-R, my own! Many times I will also make comps from them. Of course, I also do work from CDs.

Yes, I do indeed master up about an average of two a week. I usually keep at least five projects on the hard drive. If I get bored doing one project, I just jump over to another one. I jump back and forth until I finish them.

Right now I am working on a TV commercial-type CD, made from DVD, A Beatles needle drop, A Rick James needle drop, a Switch needle drop, some Phil Hendrie shows, a 60s comp in progress, and some Latino rap music.

 

Never heard the ones in Masterlink. I'm using the 192k EMU converters in my card.

 

I'm bad at math. I was better at english. Yup, two a week sounds closer, so maybe it's more like 600 CD-Rs a year? But, I make copies, and try different things.

 

Do you know how many CDs many of us have???? Jimbo would have to hire a whole army of people to copy his collection!

 

I agree! I've done it. Jitter may be the secret here.

 

Also, for those of you who have problems burning certian CD-Rs, or at higher speeds, how old is your burner?

 

My burner can't burn below 4X. It seems to work well, with one exception -- those vinyl CD-Rs that look like records. It doesn't like those. Now, it'll BURN them fine. But they won't play all the way to the end. The sound starts breaking up about the 60 minute mark. I'm speculating it's because those discs are dark blue dye??? I had a friend of mine burn a CD from that same batch, and it played fine.

Some of the earlier comments bring up a question I've always had: Should I check the "jitter correction" box when I'm burning CDs?

 

Hi Grant,

Try again. I thought you had done some cashier work?

Take care,
Jeffrey

 

Hi Grant,

I continue to doubt that someone could take what i consider to be inferior converters and inferior blanks and create a superior product.

Take care,
Jeffrey

 

I wanted to make the best quality CD-R copies from originals that I could, so I did A LOT of research on this topic before I ever started. Here are some comments on some of the loose ends hanging around in this thread:

From my understanding of things, one can correct for high rates of jitter that have been introduced into the original CD at the time of production. As most here are well aware, jitter is the "error" in the timing of the "data" on the disk. It is generally on the order of picoseconds, but apparently has an effect in the psychoacoustic realm. If a production CD is made poorly the timing between pits and lands on the disc might be such at there is a lot of jitter in the media itself.

When you extract the digital data from the disk using a computer, the jitter element goes away because now you have eliminated the physical relationship between one bit of data and the next. The trick now is to put the bits back onto another disk without reintroducing jitter in the process.

When a CD burner (or reader for that matter) spins a disk, it is ALWAYS hunting slightly for the correct speed. The data that is burned to or read from the disk is flowing at a constant bitrate, which means that the disk has to change speed as the laser moves from the inner edge to the outer edge in order to maintain a constant bitrate. So when you burn a disk the variability of the speed of the drive can certainly reintroduce jitter. This is probably the reason that many recommend slower speeds on burning -- the slower the speed the better the drive can control the its own speed.

Another technique that is employed in some drives (the Yamaha F1 drive for example) is to do a Constant Angular Velocity burn where the bitrate is varied instead of the disk speed (a record operates on the CAV principle...).

The end result or point of all of this is that it is possible to take a disk that has a high jitter rate introduced during production, extract the audio, and reburn using low jitter transfer techniques to produce a copied disk that has a lower jitter rate and therefore sounds superior to the original.

Depends on how each generation was copied. In theory, yes. In practice, probably not.

I disagree here. CD readers have enough trouble reading a disk at 1 time speed without making any errors. When you multiply that many times the rate of errors only goes up. When you spin a CD for listening on most mass market equipment, the drive will make many errors along the way. Because these errors are small, and because there is some degree of error correction, you probably won't hear them. But that doesn't meant that they're not there. So by making a direct copy of a CD you miss the opportunity to look for and correct errors before you copy those errors into the next generation of CD.

This is the precise reason why Exact Audio Copy was developed for digital audio extraction. EAC reads each bit on the disk multiple times and compares the findings to determine what is correct. If a finding cannot be made, it reads more times, up to 90 for EVERY BIT, until it either determines the correct data, or decides that a determination cannot be made.

My research into this topic has led me to the following regimen for making copies:

Use EAC for all digital extractions. EAC is a pain-in-the-butt to setup the first time, especially if you're trying to determine your drive's read and write offsets, but well worth the hassle in the end, in my opinion.

Once the audio is extracted with EAC you know that you've got a true copy of the data.

I then burn the new CD using an external Yamaha F1 drive (aside: these drives are no longer made, but you can still buy one on Ebay for not a lot of money... try to get one with a Firewire connection if your computer supports this). The copy of Nero that comes with the F1 enables the special features that I discussed above (Constant Angular Velocity burns...) as well as another feature called Audio Master Quality burns. This feature increases the lengths of the pits and lands by about 15% which approaches the Redbook limit. The idea here is that you're giving the end use CD player an additional amount of time to read the data which theoretically will reduce read errors.

I use Memorex Black CDs (mine say 48X on them, so I think they're the older disks that have been mentioned previously in this thread).

I've never done any serious comparisons between burned disks and originals, and the truth is that the differences between them, if any, are not able to even be discerned by my modest stereo equipment. However I have made copies for other SH.tv forum members who have much more respectable equipment than I, and have gotten back good word that the copies are excellent.

 

Can you direct me to any information regarding why I should be wary of CMC Magnetics?

 

By errors, I mean strictly things like Block Error Rate, etc. As long as there is no UNCORRECTABLE errors, errors that cannot be corrected by the circuitry designed to do such a thing in your CD player, you will be ok. However, a big selling point for the gold CDs of DCC and MoFi was that your error correction circuit in the CD player would come into play FAR less than the average CD. More pure audio, less 'guessing' on the part of the player.