If an enthusiast will pay $1,600 for a CD he thinks sounds better, why should we rain on his parade? I have friends who think I am mad for paying more than $200 for a pair of loudspeakers.
The files will null to infinity, and when ripped to a music server they will sound identical, but not all music servers sound the same, and not all of them sound good. There are still music lovers who use a CD player, and this Crystal Disc may sound best of all the materials that the CD is made of. (If a subjectivist is reading this, please read "preferred" for "best".)
I wrote my first paper on re-recording CDs to make them sound better in 2002. There have been thousands of downloads of various versions of that paper since, and the paper is still being downloaded occasionally. Here is a copy of the latest:
http://genesisloudspeakers.com/whitepaper/Black_CD_Paper_Ultimate.pdf
When I showed Winston that I could make a copy of his JVC-pressed K2HD sampler sound better in 2007, he was astounded. After that, we went through many, many sessions listening to different blanks, different burners, even different designs of power supply for the burner. They all sounded different. When ripped, they all null. The data is the same. BLER makes a difference, but not the difference we expect because CD technology auto-corrects (up to an extent). Unfortunately, that's the only thing we figured we could measure, so he uses it for marketing.
Yamaha postulated that the difference came from jitter encoded on the disc due to the pits on the burned CD having scorched edges. They developed a CD burner with Audio Master Mode Recording that expands the sizes of the pits (still within the Redbook tolerance) in order to reduce this jitter. This technology was later licensed by Plextor when Yamaha stopped making that particular burner. I do think that CDs burned with AMMR turned on sounds better than CDs burned with AMMR turned off.
However, if the jitter is encoded on the disc, then they should all sound the same on the players that buffer and/or re-clock the data. This turned out not to be. When Esoteric launched the P-01/D-01/GR08 at CES, it was in my room. Theoretically, with this combination, the original pressed CD and the re-burned CD should not sound any different. Unfortunately, they did. When I demo'ed it to the Japanese engineers, they could not understand how it can be and took my copy and the original back to Japan. I never heard from them.
That was when I wrote my Music Server recipe, because I just stopped burning CDs and played the files directly. However, like the CD re-burning recipe, there will always the cynics who say that it can never sound better. Some will even take the recipe, burn a CD or build a music server and say that it doesn't sound better. Invariably, when I quiz them, they will have skipped steps. So, they didn't exactly follow the recipe. If short-cuts are taken, it will sound like short-cuts are taken.
When I played my music server in Hong Kong, a couple of people came up to tell me that that was the best they've ever heard a music server sound. To me, that's a clue that not many audiophiles in Hong Kong builds music servers.
I have no doubt that the Crystal Disc will sound different from an ordinary pressed version of the same CD. If the engineers at Memory Tech went through the same rigorous process that Winston went through, I have no doubt that they think it will sound better.
If it is ripped to a music server, I have no doubt that it will sound identical to the original source file if the two files null. However, if the Crystal Disc is ripped to two differently designed music server, I also have no doubt that the two music servers MAY also sound different.
