I use EAC and a Plextor burner for ripping/burning and the copies I have made do NOT sound like the originals. I want to try a bunch of differant cdr's in the future to see which sounds best as I think that is where most/all of the sound quality is lost. So far I have used Taiyo Yuden and Mitsui Gold(Mam-A), and I find the Mitsui Gold to be very close to the original and the Taiyo Yuden to sound bright among a bunch of other things. This is based on quick impressions but I do hope to do a more in depth review of cd-r media in the near future.
A couple more things. I rip/burn at 4x but what to try 1x to see if that helps. I also what to try a higher speed to see if I can detect more of a loss in sound quality. I use the the most secure and accurate settings in EAC. I use EAC as my burning software too. I wonder if differant software can also play a part in sq in making copies??
Originally Posted by ilikemonkeys EAC is the only way to go.
It's the perfect copying software.
Seconded.
And there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to copy at your burner's highest rated speed. I do, and believe me, there are no audible deficiencies. Of course, I always make sure I'm not doing else with my computer that would take up much RAM.
When I first got a CD burner, the very first test I did was to take a great sounding CD and rip it and burn it over and over again for 20 generations. Then I racked up the 20th generation copy and the original CD up and compared them. No difference. If you are concerned about generation loss, this is the way to test for it. Try it yourself.
Originally Posted by cortez I use EAC and a Plextor burner for ripping/burning and the copies I have made do NOT sound like the originals. I want to try a bunch of differant cdr's in the future to see which sounds best as I think that is where most/all of the sound quality is lost. So far I have used Taiyo Yuden and Mitsui Gold(Mam-A), and I find the Mitsui Gold to be very close to the original and the Taiyo Yuden to sound bright among a bunch of other things. This is based on quick impressions but I do hope to do a more in depth review of cd-r media in the near future.
i'd be happy to help you set up a double blind test. all you would need is a couple friends and a free afternoon, once a protocol has been decided on.
SM@: depends on the burner and the CDs. I've mentioned elsewhere I work for a Linux company; quite often people report odd, seemingly random install problems; in most cases these problems are solved by re-burning the CDs at 4x (instead of the full speed they originally burned at). Burning at high speed can cause a bad burn, particularly with a dodgy drive or discs.
Generally, though, I agree that if you use a ripper with proper intolerance of errors like EAC - it'll just keep trying to rip until it gets it right, or has to give up - then burn at 4x or slower, you will get a perfect copy.
Originally Posted by bigshot When I first got a CD burner, the very first test I did was to take a great sounding CD and rip it and burn it over and over again for 20 generations. Then I racked up the 20th generation copy and the original CD up and compared them. No difference. If you are concerned about generation loss, this is the way to test for it. Try it yourself.
Nice
Did you ever try this with a lossy codec? Did it with iTunes once (ALAC->AAC 128 -> ALAC, about 8 generations), it's good fun & very interesting to perceive which portions of reproduction are most / less affected by compression.
Slower burning speeds do not necessarily mean less error. Most CD burners are optimized to work at their top rated speed. If you burn at a lower speeed, you may actually get more errors. Slower burning speeds will help if the problem is that your hard drive is fragmented and is having trouble keeping up.
bigshot: as I said, experience simply doesn't bear this out. If the computer is too slow to 'keep up' with the burn, it will either cancel the burning process entirely or at least throw an error; those who reported problems with high-speed burns unequivocally stated they got no error messages during burning. I can't comment on the theory, but I know about the practice.
Originally Posted by Aman Just remember to destroy all of those burned CDs or give them to the owner of the original disc after copying, or you ARE in fact breaking the law.
Originally Posted by AdamWill bigshot: as I said, experience simply doesn't bear this out. If the computer is too slow to 'keep up' with the burn, it will either cancel the burning process entirely or at least throw an error; those who reported problems with high-speed burns unequivocally stated they got no error messages during burning. I can't comment on the theory, but I know about the practice.
Back when I had an old comp with slow hard drives, it would burn the CD every time without complaint. But there would be weird ticks and little bits snipped out if I burned too fast. This was a while back. Perhaps the newer versions of toast kick up warning flags now.
There was a study I saw on the web where they took a dozen different writers and burned a CD at every speed the writer was capable of. Then they went back and did a checksum. There was no correlation between fast burns and errors. In fact the 1x burn had more errors than any of the faster speeds.
Originally Posted by bigshot Slower burning speeds do not necessarily mean less error. Most CD burners are optimized to work at their top rated speed. If you burn at a lower speeed, you may actually get more errors. Slower burning speeds will help if the problem is that your hard drive is fragmented and is having trouble keeping up.
See ya
Steve
What about the media?
Burnproof allows any problems like what you describe to be null and void, yet that does not solve the problem (also, newer hard drives should not have such problems anyway). Burning at max speed, I'd had issues, on several different drives (currently Pioneer 109 and LiteOn 812S), and burning at a lower speed usually fixed the problem. Not 4x, but usually 24x or 32x rather than 40x or 48x.
With audio CDs, burning at very slow speeds sometimes does help, but in this case, it is surely more to do with the reader than burner (I've yet to have problems on new cheap DVD players with fast burns, FI, but have had problems on a PCDP).
Quote:
Originally Posted by bighsot There was a study I saw on the web where they took a dozen different writers and burned a CD at every speed the writer was capable of. Then they went back and did a checksum. There was no correlation between fast burns and errors. In fact the 1x burn had more errors than any of the faster speeds.
This does not match with user tests I've seen, unless you're talking uncorrectable data errors (of which there should be none!). There's more to it, unfortunately, than, "do the bits make it to the disc OK?" Errors always occur, and are expected.
The test I saw was by a fella named Glenn Meadows. The page appears to be gone now. He tested a bunch of different drives and found that the correlation between speed and accuracy was pretty much random.
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