Redbook:Yet another new magic bullet arrives?

[Jahn]

maybe it is placebo, maybe not. but Romanee had his classical cd burned on Lan's joint as well, and he thought it sounded better than his original CD too. so that's 2 for 2 (not counting lan himself of course).

The resulting sound showed me that my original CD sounded muffled and cottony. could be because my 3960 isn't exactly jitter-free when playing a disc made in 1992 i guess.

 

[Glassman]

the player has to be pretty flawed if it's possible to tell difference between various discs with the same content.. a serious design flaw..

 

[Jahn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Glassman the player has to be pretty flawed if it's possible to tell difference between various discs with the same content.. a serious design flaw..

Apparently it's not just one source either - I remember checking it out through my crappy cd-rom drive in my pc with the SB Live card (!!) and I heard the same thing. everything else in my house is of lesser source quality, so not worth going to. but honestly, i'm not going to worry about it. too much trouble, i'll just listen to the tunes on the CD i bought them on.

 

[eyeteeth]

Waste of time or not I read 'The saga of the black CD' which I realize is very old news for others. http://www.genesisloudspeakers.com/w...lack_CDsII.pdf

...and came home with some black CDs.

 

[Jahn]

I BELIEVE IT!

I like the fact that it isn't just the player that picks up the data, but the burner that burns the data, that should be jitter-free. It's all true, I tell you!

But costs and laziness will keep me doing what I'm doing most likely. Ah well.

 

[Megaptera]

So let me see if I have this straight: The information is on the CD. The CDP can't get all the information because of the nature of how it's physically encoded on the disc. Rip it and recopy it to a CDR and your CDP can get at the information. I guess my question is: if the CDP can't get that information off, why can the CD-ROM? Sounds a bit like wishful thinking to me.

 

[redshifter]

is this the kodak/mitsui gold disc you were talking about?
http://www.dsgi.com/cgi-local/SoftCa...dr_mitsui.html

 

[Glassman]

this is the relevant thread.. as you can see there, EAC rips match standalone player's digital outputs easily, if not, it's due to some kind of processing, but that's the case just with really lousy megacheap toys like the Toshibas.. any decent CD player will behave just like the Pioneer mentioned there..

 

[Jahn]

b-b-but i like how mine sounds!

 

[Geise]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Megaptera So let me see if I have this straight: The information is on the CD. The CDP can't get all the information because of the nature of how it's physically encoded on the disc. Rip it and recopy it to a CDR and your CDP can get at the information. I guess my question is: if the CDP can't get that information off, why can the CD-ROM? Sounds a bit like wishful thinking to me.

Very good point actually

 

[Dreamslacker]

Quote:

Originally Posted by redshifter is this the kodak/mitsui gold disc you were talking about? http://www.dsgi.com/cgi-local/SoftCa...dr_mitsui.html

Yes, that is Mitsui Gold media. Kodak Ultima Gold is long out of production due to manufacturing costs (they use real 24K gold).

 

[Dreamslacker]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Megaptera So let me see if I have this straight: The information is on the CD. The CDP can't get all the information because of the nature of how it's physically encoded on the disc. Rip it and recopy it to a CDR and your CDP can get at the information. I guess my question is: if the CDP can't get that information off, why can the CD-ROM? Sounds a bit like wishful thinking to me.

ECC and the CDROM drive on the computer can re-read the information until it gets it. The CDP only has the time-lag before the buffer gets flushed.

One other factor to consider is that for the CDR to sound "better", so to speak, you'd need to burn it at 4x or 8x. A Dr I knew told me that this allows the pits to be better formed. Burning too slow (1x/ 2x) might cause some issues with the burner whereas burning at high speeds would cause the pits to be less well-shaped.
I'd trust him considering he's got background in this field. (Created products in the optical discs industry that's used by Federal Agencies, Pentagon and several governments).

 

[redshifter]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dreamslacker Yes, that is Mitsui Gold media. Kodak Ultima Gold is long out of production due to manufacturing costs (they use real 24K gold).

so what makes these so good?

 

[The_Mac]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Megaptera So let me see if I have this straight: The information is on the CD. The CDP can't get all the information because of the nature of how it's physically encoded on the disc. Rip it and recopy it to a CDR and your CDP can get at the information. I guess my question is: if the CDP can't get that information off, why can the CD-ROM? Sounds a bit like wishful thinking to me.

A typical pressed commercial disc is cheaply produced, and it's really not an ideal reading medium. I remember a conversation with the CEO of wadia at the recent detroit meet with a bunch of the other attendees about how wadia was striving to get all the information OFF the CD. Increasing the percentage of the disc that was actually read by the player, in order to increase sound quality, and they were working on it HARD.

Most commercial CD players only get 1 chance to read the data, and if there's an error reading it, they only get 1 chance to read the error correcting info. A typical cheap CD-rom in a PC will have as many chances as it needs, because it doesn't need to play the disc. It doesn't matter if it takes 20 minutes to rip a 4 minute track, it can afford the time.

And then burning those hard to extract and hard to read bits onto a very high quality disc will then make it so that you get fewer read errors and fewer necessary corrections in a commercial player.

It's all about how much of the data you can read, and with a typical pressed disc in a typical CD plater, it's just not as much as with a good disc.

In theory, 16bits and 44.1 khz is enough to reproduce EVERY CONCIEVABLE WAVEFORM up to 20khz and with a dynamic range of about 96dB. If you are concerned with music that has less than a 96dB dynamic range (which is most music) and has no information over 20khz, then redbook records all the possible information, and there's no possible theoretical gain from going to any other medium, vinyl, SACD, DVD-A. They're all unnecessary if you don't need over 20khz or 96dB. But you still need to read all that information, which is key.

 

[Scrith]

My usual response to this stuff is:

The $39 Sony CD-ROM drive in my computer typically reads CDs (even ones with a few minor scratches) error-free at 10-15x normal CD playback speed.

I am guessing that a $1000+ CD player can read the same CDs error-free for music playback.

If this isn't a placebo effect, then everybody needs to throw out their CD players and start using computers as sources, because they are guaranteed to be bit perfect without any snake oil.