CD Copies...why do they sound worse?

I'm sorry I arrived at this thread late. I will share my exprience. I have owned a Marantz CDR620 for about eight months now. Initally the source was a Wadia 850 and is currently (and will be for a long time a RA CD50) digital IC is from LAT international. Copies in real time. I have been pleasantly surprised with the results. My observations have been that at least the Marantz was sensitive to the CDR type being used with Mitsui providing the best performance (Apogee a close second). The most surprising thing has been comapring the same recordings I made with the 850 to those made with the CD50. Comparing copies of WELL recorded material there is a significant difference that in my opinion mimics much of the differences I notice in general between the 850 and the cd50. I have no explanation for this but can say with honestey that for the most part I prefer the copies I have made of high quality recordings only (particularly Mofi digital) from the cd50 to the originals.This is particularly true of early digital recordings with "emphasis" which can be ignored by the 620. I have no business speculating on this so I will defer. In an interesting review on Soundstage of the Linn CD12 the author comments on a similar observation using the 620. I don't get it.

So I took an Audio CD and a blank, stuck both in a philips dual-deck CD recorder (the consumer kind) and made a copy. Then loaded both disks in my PC and captured 10 copies of the CD image of each disk on to harddisk at high speed. That resulted in 10 significantly different files for each disk. Captured again at single speed (That did take about a day indeed :) and had 10 identical files for the original and 10 identical for the copy, but differences between the original and copy... SCMS!!??!! So I repeated the copy using a machine without SCMS, a stand-alone duplicator I use for software mastering... After the read and compare test, again two groups of 10 images were read at single speed. 10 identical images for the original (Unchanged from the previous set of 10), and 10 identical images for the copy, but the original and copy were significantly different. The final test I did was to write one of the original images back to CD using a CD-R in the computer, at double and single speed. These, again, were read back in the computer 10 times and compared. Both would get groups of consistant readbacks at single speed, but the images were different from eachother and from the original CD. The single speed writes were closer to the original than the double speed writes. So, I burned some more copies at single speed and did the same readback test. All copies were slightly different. All copies were very close to eachother, closer to eachother than to the original CD. Finally, I used a different CD drive to read back the original and the copy... This is where it got interesting. The copies read back binary identical, ie. a copy read on the HP it was written on was identical when read on the HP at single speed and on the companion Mitsumi drive in the same machine. However, the original disk did not work this way! It was consistant on the Mitsumi, and it was consistant on the HP, but the two sets of images differed.... I found that VERY odd!! Anyhow, all in all it resulted in over 60GB of CD images, and actually analysing that much data proofed to be hard, so I did not actually try to correlate the differences. What it proofed to me though is that there is a difference. As to the sound quality of the copies, which is what I was really interested in: The copies made on the PC at more than single speed and in the stand alone duplicator used for software sounded imperfect, clearly audible audio defects like ticks and static. The Philips made copy sounded best, I could not hear a difference. The computer made copy at single speed, to me, sounded almost as good as the original, there were some minor audible differences in the form of static. I used Easy CD Creator Pro to capture CD images and burn CD's on the computer side of things. That was a very long way of saying: No matter what I did, the copies were not identical! That was not what I expected...

Can I throw a wrench into the works? I just copied an HDCD original on my computer and played the copy on my Linn Ikemi (with HDCD decoder). While the player recognized the copy as HDCD (the HDCD light went on), the copy had a lot of unacceptable popping and "static" noise. Any explanations? Any advice?

Gboren1, try making a copy again, this time READ the original and WRITE the copy at single speed if you did not do that the first time. The behavior you describe seems to be normal when copying Audio CD's at high speed on a PC.

Gents, For burning copies i have always found the computer route to be substandard despite your read/copy speed. I use a dual bay HK for doing my copies. Sure the real time transfer is better than the 4X transfer, but I've found some recordings are more unforgiving than others. This seems to be independent of the original recording quality. When it comes down to it...you are on Audiogon. Therefore you probably have decent( i.e high cost ) components. Face it..copying CD's is piracy. Not that I'm entirely opposed to this! You gotta face the facts... the originals are better than the copies! If you are someone that calls themself an audiophile or enthuasiast just suck it up and pay the cd prices. Even HDCD's aren't that much...so quite whining :) YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR!!!!!! Later! Hunter