Maxell Japan -R have failed after 1 year!

[davideck]

Digital bits may be absolute 1's or 0's, but when it's an audio stream it has to be timed perfectly down to the nanosecond.

My favorite audiophile joke comes to mind:
"Wow, did you hear that! Your right speaker cable must be half a foot shorter than the left one."

(And just for the record, no I can't hear the difference between half a foot of cable.)

Electrical current propagates along a wire at about one nanosecond per foot. Can you hear the difference between one foot of cable?

[Bodysurf]

Incidently, is there any source for AZO discs made in Japan?

I don't know of ANY available data AZO CD-Rs, except Verbatim DataLifePlus. And I don't think they are made in Japan.

There may be music AZO CD-Rs (which are made in Japan), but I am unfamiliar with them.

[Bodysurf]

Electrical current propagates along a wire at about one nanosecond per foot. Can you hear the difference between one foot of cable?

If you randomly give me the two choices, I can hear the difference, on average, 50% of the time.

[Jester700]

the FIFO buffer and ability to reclock the data stream take care of everything that comes after...

Yep - for those who can comprehend it, a tidbit of "technobabble" can blow away tons of marketing hype and ill informed claims that are "based on years of experience".

And for those who can't, there's always audiophilia...

Really, now, have you EVER done an ABX test? Do you have even the vaguest idea of the concept?

[Jester700]

When I first bought a CD burner I thought all CD-R/W would sound the same no matter how cheap/expensive they were, so I just bought some cheap discs. Then I slowly started using other brands and noticed that every brand sounded "different" from the other. I wasn't EXPECTING to hear any difference between discs, so this is NOT placebo effect. In fact, I remember being puzzled as to why I did hear a difference. I only read the audiophile technical stuff AFTER the fact, when I was looking for answers, so it never had any influence on my judgement beforehand. So after using Verbatim, Sony, TDK, etc. and comparing them all, I came to the conclusion that Mitsui, Ricoh, and Taiyo Yuden discs had the most likeable sound quality. And I also noticed that burning speed had a direct impact on sound quality too.

I still can't really explain why there are differences. It's either jitter, how well the pits are created or laser refraction thru the disc. But whatever it is, there is a difference to my ears (and other people as well). If you don't hear a difference - fine. Maybe my ears are more sensitive than others.

There are two possibilities:
1) You can really hear a difference.
2) You can't really hear a difference, but you think you can.

If others say they CAN'T hear a difference, they might be tin ears, or they might be honest and you're deluding yourself.

I'm not saying I have any idea which this might be. There ARE differences to be heard, especially in scratched discs or questionable CDRs. This has been mentioned - if error rates go beyond the system's ability to CORRECT them so that it then needs to INTERPOLATE data, it very well may sound different. And the more interpolations, the more difference in data and thus sound.

But this has nothing to do with bulk erasers or other such bullshit.