Hi dvavc,
I totally agree with your posts
I have ripped a lot of CD in WAV ( no data compression) to my PC´s HD using more than 1 cd/dvd drive and the end result was always the same.
Playing the same track from the HD and directly from the original CD(with the same dc/dvd drive used for ripping) sound quite different.
Useless to say that the original CD sound much better than playing from the HD. The differences I always notice are the ones you've already described.
The tracks on the HD usually sound a bit harsher, some lack of low frequency presence and detail which leads to some loss of stereo dimension. Once you compare to the original you realize that listening to the copy is a much poor musical experience.
The D/A path is the same for both cases as I am always using the same sound card. The digital stream processed by the sound card seems to be the same in both cases, as the digital data coming out of the cd/dvd drive while playing the original CD has no special encryption for any copy protection.
I have ripped audio CD´s using EAC and some others but the end result is always the same.
I know that reading data from audio CD is not the same as reading from a CD-Rom and so it is prone to some errors. Usually those error should be heard as some kind of pops.
Instead, this sound differences look more like some kind of jitter effect that is present while playing the copy ( some kind of out of clock sync).
By the way the same think happens to me with the DVD sound track when I rip a DVD-video. And here we don´t have those error problems as with a CD-A, because data in a DVD-Video is stored as files like in a CD-Rom. Once you descramble the data with DVDRipper you must get the exact audio and video content.
I haven´t found any reasonable explanation for this audio differences. I searched on the web, posted in some other forums...
I suppose the only way is to get access to the data stream the sound card is processing in either cases and try to figure out what is going on.
I live in Portugal, so sorry for my English.
