I'm not dreaming - these are great CD copies


I have an out of town friend who's given me some CD-Rs that he's made by simply copying music off of red book CDs. The music quality is extremely good - better than I'm used to hearing from my red book CDs. He's not an audiophile and has no idea what format is being utilized e.g. Lossless, etc.
Question - Can you really improve the quality of music from a red book CD by simply copying to some other format? If so, I'm boxing up all 300 of my CDs and asking my friend to copy make copies for me.
rockyboy

nonoise
There is a review (that I can’t locate) that explained how a laser reads the physical pits and grooves of a CD. It’s being done in an analog fashion ( a mechanical process) which then had to be processed into the digital domain.

>>>Exactly! The pits and lands are non reflective and reflective areas, respectively on the metal layer. The geometry of the pits and lands and laser assembly is such that when the CD laser beam hits a pit the reflection is canceled due to wave interference so the photodetector detects no signal. The photodetector only detects reflected signal from lands. The length of both pits and lands varies and it’s the series of various lengths of pits and lands that determines the digital information in the analog to digital converter.

Diagram 1 - CD Laser Reads Bumps (Pits Inverted) and Lands,
both of which have reflective metal surfaces. The photodetector
receives no signal from bumps, only from lands, due to destructive
interference of light waves. See last paragraph below.

Pits and Lands come in 9 different lengths, from T3 to T11.

T3 = 10001
T4 = 100001
T5 = 1000001
T6 = 10000001
T7 = 100000001
T8 = 1000000001
T9 = 10000000001
T10 = 100000000001
T11 = 1000000000001

since the spiral of pits and lands is Nano scale any vibration or wobble of the CD can force the servo mechanism to go into oscillation, producing read errors. Also the background scattered laser light gets into the photodetector, producing errors. Thus painting the outer edge of the CD Green prior to ripping will produce a better rip. 

It’s removing one form of jitter on the burned copy when the laser reads it,and a burned vs pressed cd can certainly sound better,
lwr noise = more music.

Kenny.
Multiple generations of read/writing increases the error count of the original by quite a margin.
Once a zero or one (from the previous readable pit) has been substituted for the original unreadable pit, there is no way it can be resurrected to be a readable original.
There is always only a downhill slide the more times it read and written.

Cheers George

Excellent points as above. I concur about better error correction, reduced jitter by burning a CD-r copy.

Happy Listening!

reduced jitter by burning a CD-r copy.
This mainly depends on what the jitter spec is of the dac and it's interface to the transport/streamer that doing the last d to a conversion, not so much if a original or burnt copy is used.

Cheers George