cd audio quality??

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cBas

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when an audio cd is burned using a program like adaptec easy cd
creator, is there a loss of audio quality. If so, why, isn't it all digital?
What about MD recorders. Any way to copy cd's flawlessly?
 
uhh...

I don't think their is a loss of quality when burning, what you have in front of you, is what goes on cd.
If this is wrong, I've been wrong for long..
 
cBas, what PRIZ told you is correct.

No, there is no loss when you are burning from computer to CD.

Once your data is in the DIGITAL domain it's in the digital domain, and it will basically remain the same when being transferred DIGITALLY.

spin
 
A straight transfer or burn to CD - no, you won't lose quality (well, except due to jitter, but that's a whole other story!) But there are cases where you will lose - if your recording is say 24-bit and it has to be "dumbed-down" to 16 (for standard Red Book), then you *can* lose quality in the dumbing-down process. But a straight digital transfer results in no loss (except for that jitter thing!)

Now for MD recorders, you will lose all kinds of quality due to ATRAC compression schemes... MD recorders use lossy compression to store a signal, so a good chunk of signal is thrown out (as determined by the ATRAC algorithms). If you repeatedly transfer a signal from MD to MD, you WILL lose quality.

(But ya know, come to think of it, how will MD handle digital transfers? Does it presume the signal is already ATRAC encoded when it's at the digital IN? And if it has to re-encode, that means you could never do a clean digital transfer between two MD machines with no loss! Anyone know for sure? ...now *I'm* curious!!)

How's that for complicating the answer? :D :D

Bruce
 
Ahhh....so much misinformation, so little time.

I recommend that everybody read this. The short answer is that yes, you can lose quality burning/copying audio CD-R's on a computer. You've got several possible errors to contend with: uneven pit spacing, jitter,
phase noise, clock shift, etc. All of these will degrade audio quality. If you're burning important stuff, its best to do it at 1x to reduce these errors (for some newer burners its 2x). And if you're sending stuff to a mastering house DO NOT send it as an audio CD. If that's the format they request, you might want to look for a new mastering house. Its much better to simply burn a data CD-R of .wav files, preferably at 24-bit.
 
Dolemite said:
You've got several possible errors to contend with: uneven pit spacing, jitter,
phase noise, clock shift, etc. All of these will degrade audio quality.
Click to expand...
Didn't I just say that, only in less words??? ;)

Dolemite said:
And if you're sending stuff to a mastering house DO NOT send it as an audio CD. If that's the format they request, you might want to look for a new mastering house. Its much better to simply burn a data CD-R of .wav files, preferably at 24-bit.
Click to expand...
And you talk about misinformation! :eek: :) - you certainly can send a CD - a CD24 (for example as burned by my Masterlink) is a 24-bit/96K recording that can easily be read as AIFF-format files by MANY mastering facilities. Of course, CD24 CDs can't be read by audio CD players, but they make excellent delivery mechanisms for final mixes prep'd for mastering.

Bruce
 
Blue Bear Sound said:
And you talk about misinformation! :eek: :) - you certainly can send a CD - a CD24 (for example as burned by my Masterlink) is a 24-bit/96K recording that can easily be read as AIFF-format files by MANY mastering facilities. Of course, CD24 CDs can't be read by audio CD players, but they make excellent delivery mechanisms for final mixes prep'd for mastering.

Bruce
Click to expand...

No, no, no, Bruce.....did you even read my post? Please, by all means burn a CD to send to a mastering house. Data CD-R, fine. CD24, fine. But NOT a 16-bit redbook audio CD. If you just burn the same .wav files to a data cd that you would use to make that audio cd you will eliminate a lot of the errors. Basically, a data cd will be read until the CD-ROM drive gets it 100% right....no so for an audio CD and the burning process is less accurate as well. Why introduce errors into your recording?
 
Hey man! Not comin' down on ya... I generalized on jitter and you called me on it! You generalized on CDs to mastering houses and I called you on it.... all in good fun - I wasn't being all-serious about it - I *did* use smilies!!!!!!!!! (does *no one* look at those things??)

Wouldn'a done it at all if it weren't for your "misinformation" comment!!! Just threw a bit 'o sarcastic humour back at ya, is all!

Cheers dude,

Bruce
 
Ahhh, I gotcha.... :p

Sorry Bruce, I'm not in "sarcasm comprehension mode" this early in the morning. I just dish it out until after 10:00 AM or so ;)
 
Interesting. Well to be honest I'm not very experienced in all this. Right now Im using a HP 4 speed cd rewritable drive and I have some cd burning programs from Adaptec. The program has a table that says drag audio wav files here and a nother menue for browsing and selecting audio or wav files. So I place my cd in the dvd drive, enter in the dvd drives name into the browser and drag all my audio tracks to the first table I mentioned. Then I click "make cd." I havn't converted the audio into wav format.. Would this be advisable to do first? Okay, thats how I burn my cds for now, no mastering or editing yet. But for now, with all the precautions taken, there is no real serious loss of quality? I think thats what I understand.
 
I read the article Dolemite referred to. Very informative reading, thanks! But it seemed to me that the point of the article was that recording at higher speeds does not degrade the quality, at least not significantly. In some cases, slower speeds were actually worse. But the differences are so small as to be insignificant.

I wish he had tested some cheap no-name brands of CD-Rs to see what the error rates were. Also, I'd like to see some tests with a less expensive brand of CD recorder. I'd like to get some idea of what my error rates might be.

Anyway, there were two things that were not clear to me from the article:

1.) Do audio CD players employ CIRC correction like CD-ROMs or do they only use blanking and interpolation? I assume that they do use CIRC since he says "CDs use, at their base level of error correction, CIRC,…". Then I assume that if errors cannot be corrected at the C2 stage that blanking or interpolation are used.

2.) Does the audio CD format specify the type of correction to be employed (that is, less correction) or is it simply that audio CD players happen to use less correction? Is there anything to prevent a good quality audio CD reader from using just as much error correction on audio as a CD-ROM would use on data?

Jim
 
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