[abernardi]

I've been auditioning speakers and decided to burn a couple of CD's with my favorite test music.  But I noticed these CD's don't sound right.  The frequency range seems reduced.  It's not noticeable on casual listening, but for critical listening I'm definitely missing the air and the thump, it's constricted.  I thought it might be my imagination so I did some comparisons to the original disk and it was noticeable.
These are from my CD collection that I digitized to iTunes on my mac in ALAC, using the standard method.  They sound OK on my headphones from the mac, tho I haven't listened to them through a good dac.  And I burned them thru iTunes on the mac on some garden variety HP CDRs. 
I thought this would be good enough, but now I'm not sure where the problem or problems lie.  I'm not so interested in burning hi-quality CD's in the end because I'll be listening off my computer, but I am concerned that my rips are bad and really don't want to do it all over again (1000+ CD's).  I know my next step is to compare some CD's to my ALAC files with a good DAC.
Anybody have similar issues with CDR audio quality?

[toddbagwell]

i have noticed that CDs are louder when played from my optical drive than when ripped. in my system, it was a few db roughly.

confirm the average SPL with a cheap SPL meter or app for your phone before worrying about re-ripping or any other changes.

todd

[Vincent Kars]

If you have ripped your CDs with iTunes set to secure mode, I don’t think it likely your rips contains error.



Have you burned a true Audio CD (Redbook) or is it a MP3 CD?

You might re-rip a CD using Max http://sbooth.org/Max/ and check if the results are different.