Digital Drive

Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

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RE: CD-R Burn Quality and Laser Noise During Playback

Posted by jaydacus on May 27, 2017 at 07:30:54:
What possible value is a CD-R in the year 2017????

If you are using CD-Rs clearly you are not a CD format purest.

Technical issues aside, yeah most CD-Rs sound like crap compared to the original CDs. There is opportunity for loss at every point in the process.

1. How good was the rip of the original CD? Speed, extraction quality, encoding quality, file integrity, etc.

2. Writer, media, speed, and yes even software do matter. The quality of each can vary widely for produce anything from something very close to the original to absolute harsh digital sounding rubbish.

3. How good is the error correction of your CD player? CD-Rs contain many times more errors than pressed CDs. No matter how good the DAC in the CD player is and no matter how good the burn, media, burner, rip, etc was, you will hear absolute harsh digital garbage if the error correction is not really good.

Ending about a decade ago I burned hundreds of CD-Rs and tried dozens of combinations of all of the above. My results ranged from "not bad" to "absolute harsh digital rubbish".

Starting about a decade ago I discovered that skipping the CD-R and finding increasingly better and better ways to get the sound directly from my computer to my amplifier meant that I only had to worry about the rip quality of the original CD, which as it turned out, was the easiest part to get right. Producing and playing back a CD-R that doesn't sound like absolute digital rubbish turned out to be the hardest part to get right and pointless to even try.