CD-R quality (was Re: Shameless CDR vs CD questions)

[John Rennie]

A boffin starts:

Data CDs can be copied as many times as you like, and barring
failures of your CD drive all the copies will be identical.

However audio CDs are not encoded onto the disk in the same way as
data CDs. Different CD drives will read the same audio CD and return
different data depending on the exact way they process the data on
the audio CD. That's one reason why expensive CD players sound better
than cheap ones.

So if you take an original CD, copy it and burn the copy to a CDR,
the copy will be close to the original but not identical. If you make
a second generation copy the second copy will be different again, and
so on. The recording speed won't make any difference. The difference
comes only from the way the electronics in the CD drive extract data
from the audio CD.

In practice I can't tell the difference between a first and second
generation copy on my HiFi. Maybe with a better HiFi (and younger
ears!) I could, but I suspect the difference is very small. In any
case I generally use MP3s these days, and even though they are
allegedly lower quality than CD I can't hear the difference between a
CD and an MP3 ripped at 256KHz or greater.

Hope this helps more than it confuses!

JR

-----Original Message-----
From: BOC/Hawkwind Discussion List [mailto:BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET] On Behalf Of trev
Sent: 12 February 2008 23:11
To: BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET
Subject: Re: CD-R quality (was Re: Shameless CDR vs CD questions)

hail mary,

before the boffins start, i must say that if you are burning with 7 year old equipment (like mike coleman does) which might have a maximum burning speed of 8x, the 4x might be dodgy.
however, nowadays the standard maximum speed for cd burners is around 50x, so...

or am i talking about something completely different?

mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike coleman mike colehole colehole dogdick

----- Original Message -----
From: "vzenv14m" <maryann.sullivan1 at VERIZON.NET>
To: <BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET>
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 10:37 PM
Subject: Re: CD-R quality (was Re: Shameless CDR vs CD questions)


>I have a question, or 2, if a CD is burned from another CDR does that make 
>a
> difference, and does it matter if the copies are made in real time, or
> faster.  I was always under the impression that since it's all digital 
> there
> should be no loss of info, but a friend claims when someone burns discs at
> quadruple speed they don't play right?
> I understand there's generational loss with tapes, but I'd think it would
> matter digitally?  Just wondering.
>
> Kaduflyer
>