Haha, cutting edge technology inadvertently does its job again: I had
written a long winded response to a message in this thread, trying to set
straight the whole issue of CD encoding, but my mail server refused to send
it. :)
Now that it's working again, almost all of what I had to say has been said,
so here's the remaining bit: (my apologies to those annoyed by the
continuance of this off topic thread!)
Making a digital copy of a CD won't make it sound worse. There _is_ a way
that you can lose quality in that process, but it's a matter of the
suitability of your hardware to the task, not a restriction of the format.
What can happen is that, because of the streaming nature of the CD Audio
reading process, some read errors are not corrected on the fly. This can be
avoided if you run your CD drive in CDDA mode (old drives didn't support
this), and do jitter correction, where you read an overlapping section of
data, and if you don't get the same thing, you read it again until you're
sure you've got it right. At that point you have the same bits as are on
the original CD. When you then write them onto another CD, it will sound
exactly the same. Again, if you have poor quality hardware and/or media,
you can increase the error rate, which would cause changes in the audio
signal, but given the physics of it, I believe it would take a relatively
extreme case for that to be audible.
-Sam
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