If you burn a CD from an original; personally do you feel you lose anything?

I'm surprised the Gorts haven't already locked this thread.

Music on CD is composed of a series of bits. A bit can have only two values, 1 and 0. Merely copying bits from one place to another does not change the bits. You cannot have a 1 bit that is different from another 1 bit, or a zero bit that is different from another zero bit.

There are only two ways you can unintentionally affect the sound quality of a CD transfer, assuming your ripping program copies the bits directly:

1. errors (spots that can't be read/written) either on the source CD or on the burned CD
2. jitter (in a nutshell, variance in the rate that the bits are read/written/transmitted)

If you have drive mechanisms of resonable quality, quality programs, and quality media, neither of these should be an issue. I find it hard to believe that either of these things can impact sound quality positively, but I suppose it's possible.

 

Mofi reprinted an article from a German publication which said MOFI's are the best and improve sound. Has anyone used MOFI's cdrs?

 

and the gun shots.

mud-

 

Yes, I use 'em for stuff I want to archive, they do sound better over regular CDR's.
I've found that the higher the burn speed the more compressed/crappier the sound.
My 2 cents.

 

I don't feel I lose anything, no. At least nothing my 48-yr-old ears can detect.

 

CD-R's sound the same....but now, Baltimore during rush hour can improve your listening experience.......................... if you like gangsta rap in surround!

 

Doug
I put earplugs in when the kids mow the lawn.........................

 

What he said.

 

I've made about 400 copies of my own discs (for personal use only, honest) and I can't tell any different. Then again, I'm partially deaf in one ear, so what do I know.

As stated above, if you use good ripping and burning programs, a good burner and the source and copy is lossless, there shouldn't be any difference.

 

Right now, LPs sound enough better than CDs that I really don't care. Everything I've burned on the Sony RCD W1 sounds identical to the source being copied, and I assume that ripping via I-Tunes and burning at high speed on the Mac results in some audible loss. In the places where I listen to the CDs compiled on the I-Mac---at work, in the car or on a boombox---the gear most likely masks the differences. There's always an audible difference when recording from Vinyl, but I'm sure the built-in Burr-Brown converters in the G5 I-Mac were built to cost, and a very low one at that. Add a better A/D to my shopping list.

 

Definitely, there's a very slight noticeable loss that increases as does the speed at which your CD-R is burned in my experience.

 

If I sell the original CD after burning a copy I lose a little self-respect, but that's about all.

 

Well, I care.

For one, we have threads...what, seems like twice a month now where people bring up the do-two-identical-CDs-sound-the-same argument. For another, I see people saying the following thing every once in a while:

"Wow, this forum makes me spend so much money on out of print gold CDs!"

I'm going to share a little secret. I have a ridiculously large collection of Mobile Fidelity and DCC gold discs. I'm going to share another little secret: most of them are on CDRs. I'm going to share a third secret: all (well, most) are bit-identical to the original discs, and I can see no reason why they might sound different.

Now, if you were to operate at the intersection of audiophile mythology--that bit-identical CDs sound different, and that CDRs are inferior to original CDs--then, well, to get the experience of the real deal, you'd have to drop ridiculous sums of money to get an out of print "Ringo" DCC (which generates no money for anybody except the guy who sold it to you), as opposed to buying the stock disc (to clear your conscience) and getting a CDR from someone.

For those lurkers reading this...for those people straddling the fence on this particular issue. I speak to you. If you do it right--and even sometimes if you do it incorrectly--you get the same thing on a copy as you had on the original. You may feel you are losing something, but that feeling is both understandable and irrational; we're all prone to deceiving ourselves, even when we think we're above it (ask Luke about my replacement car stereo sometime).

So go ahead. Copy to your heart's content.

 

No, not definitely. You are stating your opinion as fact again. There's no info lost when you burn at higher speeds. The data will be exactly the same. It's certaily possible that some CD players (some car players for example) won't play CDR's burned at high speeds becase of how the data is presented on the disc but the *data* is the same.

EDIT: David beat me to the punch.

 

The only reason I don't post on these threads much anymore is because I've lost the patience; but for the record, I concur with David Goodwin and Chris M -- if done correctly, there is NO difference. We're not saying that it's impossible that there would be a difference. If you screw up the rip or burn, then sure, it could be different. Even then, the "difference" would be skips or pops, *not* a loss of bass or treble, etc. When done right, which, contrary to what some argue, is not THAT hard and does not require a Ph.D. in Physics, there is not an audible difference.

 

I use Record Now! and I notice no difference. That's unusual considering every time I read the Absolute Sound or Stereophile I notice all kinds of differences.

As far as legality, I too make safety backups of my eclectic collection, most of which has been out of print since its small production run. That and needle drops use up a lot of CD-Rs. Like most audiophiles, I enjoy packaging, if for no other reason, it helps me keep my collection in ... some order.

Best regards,
Kevin

 

There is no difference. If you hear a difference, you did something wrong. This is not pretend facts, this is the facts. Using EAC setup properly they will be the same. Burning speed and all this other stuff is green marker voodoo. Sorry to be so harsh, but this garbage has to end.

 

Yep.

 

I feel a little bit of my soul dies.

 

I realize that this may be a weird time/place to bring this up, but I recall a really fascinating thread on one of the DVD forums recently...I feel like it was CDFreaks, but I may be misremembering. Anyway, the discussion was about DVDShrink, which is a program that lets you transcode DVD video to a lower bitrate in order to fit double-layer discs into one layer (albeit with a reduction of quality), but which also can be used as a sort of indirect authoring tool. DVD Shrink is, IMO, one of the most amazing pieces of free software to be birthed from the prolific loins of the great mother freeware.

Anyway, back to the point: this conversation revolved around a guy who swore he could see difference in DVD Shrink's output. Not compressed output, mind you; this was the entire-movie-fits-on-one-disc-so-we-remove-the-extras-and-leave-everything-the-same output. Colors were muted, he said; details not quite as fine; black saturation not quite as convincing. People were intrigued. It was unlikely that DVD Shrink was actually doing anything to the video stream (if it was, how did it do it so quickly in comparison to the relatively sluggish transcoding process), but it was certainly possible.

Tests were done. The results were eventually conclusive: DVD Shrink was simply copying components of the stream, and was not changing anything in that particular mode.

So the perception that copying innately affects content is not limited to the digital audio world. The difference there, though, is that I don't recall it coming up again since.

In summary: the only thing lost during copying is Ryan's soul.

 

Sometimes I lose a CD-R if either myself or my burner screws up.

 

I think some people here are trying to apply analog reasoning to digital audio. They think a copy must be worse than the original because in the analog world a dub won't be as good as the master. Perhaps they think slower burn speeds are better because they are thinking of half speed mastered LP's? Just a hunch..

 

Sorry. Wrong. As far as burn speeds are concerned, there are very real differences in sound, and it's not always subtle. Burn a copy at 52x, or as fast as you can go, and then burn one at, say, 4x, and compare them. No contest.

 

Nope. Do the test yourself.

 

Did it. I did this RIGHT NOW, with my copy of disc four of the Final Fantasy X soundtrack. They sounded exactly the same. Now can you quit claiming this as fact every time it comes up? Because it isn't.

Even if there were "A very real difference," what would cause it? What could possible cause such a consistent difference?