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Amazon CDs Which Are Actually CDRs


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I'm tired of having to dig through piles and racks and stacks and trekking all over creation just to play a record. And then again. And then again.

I'm tired of cluttering up everything with stuff that nobody wants after I'm dead.

I have an uncle who lives out in the country and he has a burn pile. When we got everything out of my mom's house that we wanted to keep, we loaded up a trailer, took a ride to the burn pile, and that was it. Ash in less than an hour. Lovely, transient ash. 

I don't have a burn pile here in the city, and even if I did, what kind of toxic fumes from all this plastic are there going to be?

Yuck.

Kids - your Boomer forefathers have failed you in SO many ways. Learn from our mistakes of vanity, self-indulgence, and gluttony. Grow your files and lose your product.

Blurp.

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57 minutes ago, mikeweil said:

Not necessarily. There is always a certain low percentage of incorrectly copied  0s and 1s. That is why we need error correction and oversampling. 

That is also what I tried to cover in the first half of my post. Sorry if it was unclear.

If the stream is identical, the sound is identical. If there is error correction involved, there is a potential for differences.

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15 hours ago, jazzbo said:

I disagree a bit. At a certain point bits aren't just bits but electrical pulses traveling along metal or glass or fibre media. If the files were burned to cdr and played back in the same chain as the cd probably no discernible sound difference. But if played back from a computer etc. they would not necessarily at all be identical. Even a cable difference (in my system it would be an HDMI carrying I2S data compared to a USB from the computer) can cause a sonic difference in certain systems. If you can't hear that in a system, okay, but I have heard differences.

At the point where "bits aren't just bits but electrical pulses" in fact there are no bits and bytes; the cables are carrying audio signals.  Prior to that, when the information is encoded in the form of bits and bytes, there actually isn't a whole lot of problem getting the information from one place to another without loss regardless of whether its DSD or PCM. 

You have a tendency to mix up digital audio files (and sometimes the media that contains them) and the sounds that result from playing them.  The files are the same regardless; the audio coming out of different systems playing those digital files might not be the same.

SACD disks and hardware aren't really compatible or comparable to other media. 

Edited by Stompin at the Savoy
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I'll disagree still. Yes, an audio signal (but what do you think an audio signal is?) and subject to the influence of metal type and crystal structure etc. or in the case of optical light over fiber, and these material and cabling geometry DO influence the sound.

 

Edited by jazzbo
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5 minutes ago, jazzbo said:

I'll disagree still. Yes, an audio signal and subject to the influence of metal or in the case of optical light over fiber, and these material and cabling geometry DO influence the sound.

 

I don't disagree.  This is audio technology and not new.  The digital end of the process does not work the same way. Whatever is going over optical cable is very likely encoded and not audio.

Edited by Stompin at the Savoy
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By the way I was referring to info transferred from transport/PC to DAC, where it really is not an audio signal in the sense of an analog signal.

This difference in cabling and material and how that influences both a digital and analog signal is at the heart of the matter of why I prefer disc playback in my system. The two different playback systems sound different, and I prefer the one over the other and decided to not go in the computer/file or streaming direction.

In the case of my system Redbook and SACD are not that divergent, the DAC accepts (licensed) raw DSD from the transport and converts Redbook input to DSD64 before conversion.

Edited by jazzbo
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12 minutes ago, jazzbo said:

I'll disagree still. Yes, an audio signal (but what do you think an audio signal is?) and subject to the influence of metal type and crystal structure etc. or in the case of optical light over fiber, and these material and cabling geometry DO influence the sound.

 

An audio signal is really really different from digital data.  We need to be clear on this or we are just confusing ourselves.

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5 minutes ago, jazzbo said:

See my edited post above.

I think I have made my position clear. If anyone wants further from me they can emai me. I've no more to contribute to this thread about CDRs.

Well, I agree with you that you have a superior system there.  I think you are somewhat confused about why and the bigger picture in digital audio.  If you are going to proclaim that you prefer physical cds you should make clear early on that you are actually talking about SACD disks and equipment.

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38 minutes ago, Stompin at the Savoy said:

Well, I agree with you that you have a superior system there.  I think you are somewhat confused about why and the bigger picture in digital audio.  If you are going to proclaim that you prefer physical cds you should make clear early on that you are actually talking about SACD disks and equipment.

I'm NOT actually only talking about SACD discs. My SACD holding is less than 1 percent of my collection, and I predominantly listen to Redbook and LPs. My main playback system for digital though does utilize DSD format as the final stage, rather than PCM. I don't feel I'm confused, sorry. Perhaps I am not explaining things as well as I could, I have been building audio systems for nearly fifty years and have accumulated some knowledge and experience but I'm not an engineer nor a professional reviewer. I do understand that cds are "dying or dead," and that various non-physical formats are filling the void. It just doesn't matter to me especially as the sound is different, and in my opinion and to my tastes in my systems not in a better way. And I have more cds than I need and can still find what I want on cd (including in my own collection :)). If others listen to non-physical media, that's great. 

Please PM me going forward if needed.

Edited by jazzbo
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I don't know how many times we have to go over this... there's no way a few misread 1's & 0's in a digital bitstream is going to change the frequency response of any playback. Misread digital data that the error correction cannot correct will result in noise like clicking or blanking, not any sort of modified output signal. The chain of 1's & 0's to create just a few seconds of music is astronomically huge and to change those few seconds of audio would require 10's of thousands of those 1's & 0's getting flipped... and that's only if the aren't corrected by error correction system.

The CD standard is 44,100 digital samples per second. Think about that and imagine how many those 44,100 bits would have to change in just the exact way to make that single second of music go from a 5 kHz sound to a 7 kHz sound. Not going to happen.

People need to stop attributing analog signal analysis to digital.

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On 5/22/2024 at 7:44 PM, Teasing the Korean said:

This may be the case with fly-by-night budget labels that release grey-market CDRs from mp3s.  But if it is a CDR from a legit label - especially if the title had already been released by that label on a real CD - I'm sure it would be an exact clone of the CD.  Converting lossless to mp3 for a CDR would be an unnecessary step in the process. 

I can tell you that I have heard Document CDRs that, even of very old material, are clearly degraded by changing to MP3s at some point; there is an increased graininess. But you need to think about what these companies are doing - they are transferring all their CDs to CDRs and digital audio takes up a lot of storage space, so they actually have a good reason to convert to MP3, as it saves an enormous amount of storage for them, which equals cash saved.

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15 hours ago, Ken Dryden said:

I just learned that NIls Winther is repressing certain older titles as CDRs in small batches that are slower sellers. Too bad they aren't marked as such, I would probably look for a real CD on the open market.

This was already happening for years .... unfortunately ....

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I have been trying to pick up a few older titles, but this is the first one I've encountered on SteepleChase.

It is almost like Coca-Cola's substitution of "New Coke" before they redesigned a new label to indicate the substandard product with the drastic formula change that left long time customers furious.

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5 minutes ago, soulpope said:

https://www.discogs.com/de/label/1295241-SteepleChase-45th-Anniversary-Legend-Collection

When japanese Think! Records Label reissued older SteepleChase releases in 2017, the bonus - beneath the superb transfer quality - was the assurance these were CD's ....

The reason that disclaimer was there is because Steeplechase did use CD-Rs for a short time. I received a couple of them.

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