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Have you ever heard people claiming that black CDR's play better... Heard thier raves about opening up the sound etc... Wondered why ???
The reason this can happen is that CD drives in audio equipment are reading in real time (small buffer for scratches sometimes) and feeding that ouput in a linear fashion. Errors are 'corrected' by interpretation etc.
The black CDR may allow the read head to get the audio data more accurately and so less errors happen.
When using a PC based solution with a top quality ripper (like EAC or MC in digital secure) the ripper will keep rereading multiple times until it gets a reading reliably or gives up as the sector in not accurately readable. This data is then stored on disc in the best cleanest read it can and fed with checksums to the soundcard.
Hence the best read of a black CDR in a linear read fashion still has less chance of a perfect error corrected free output than a PC based solution. Add in the fact that unless you are using very high end equipment that reclocks the SPDIF bitstream (a la Meridian etc) you are slaving the clock a long way up the chain with multiple points for jitter to occur as per my earlier post.
99% of the time that people have faulted a PC playback solution they have not heard a recent Pro card with bit perfect playback SW set up properly. To listen to a default install of musicmatch bit mangling everything over directsound or waveout or even lossy encoding is not what should be used as a demo tool.
