Playing "Copy Protected" CD's

I've been trying to copy an old CD in my collection (Dave Grusin and the NY-LA Dream Band) on to my harddrive.  The disc itself was simply not recognized as a disc by my Mac and I had to disconnect the DVD-R drive to get it ejected.

Then I tried making a copy using my SmartAndFriendly CD copier.  That seemed to work (and it said PA meaning Passed) but once again, the computer wouldn't load it.

So then I tried playing it on my Denon 9000 (since I was streaming through the 205 at the time).  It showed the track counts but never got past 0:00.  It positively locked up the Oppo BDP-205, which I had to shut down, and then press "eject" to start the player up before it would try to load the disc.  The Oppo BDP-95 locked up similarly.

But I popped the disc into the Pioneer PD-75, and it started right up.

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There was a fairly brief moment in the mid 90's when record companies decided to thwart the newly possible copying of CD's (now that computer CDROM drives were available).

They threw in bogus crap in optical surface or digital stream so that the erstwhile CD's were not truly Redbook conforming.  But old style CD players that were not computers generally wouldn't notice the difference. 

It didn't work because it infamously didn't even work in all CD players, which themselves were becoming more and more like computers (a transition that was basically complete by the time you had DVD/CD players...which are basically little AV computers).

Some manufacturers were hoping "dual laser" systems would solve the problem.  CD's would get the "old fashioned" treatment.  But that wasn't possible because the resulting "dual laser" systems wouldn't read CD-R's (remember the Sony DVD-7000, a "reference" DVD player for at least a couple years, played CD's but not CD-R's).  Plus they were expensive.

Ultimately the audio industry bought up the recording industry and solved the problem for music simply by not giving a damn anymore about whether music copying could be technically prevented, but having million dollar litigation against copyright violators.  And also paying most musicians next to nothing for "streaming" music while just a few top artists make gazillions from multi modal appearances.

But that "not giving a damn" part has remained somewhat variable.  Copying from SACD's in the original DSD form was not possible for quite a few years until it was, but still not supported on most equipment.

(I see the SACD format as an attempt to bring back copy protection for audio, that's what David Rich concluded in a technical analysis published in Stereophile (!) in 2001.)

Anyway, nowadays many if not most audiophiles (like me) copy their own discs and other files onto their computer hard drives and use some sort of of software based system to queue up and play their music.  This is so much nicer than the olde days!

So then what about those "copy protected" CD's ?  Well, for this purpose, it may be necessary to have an old fashioned CD player which is not like a computer drive.

I have two such players (a Sony 507 ESD and a Pioneer PD-75) but only the Pioneer is close to hand.  In fact I set it atop the "for sale equipment" pile next to my system (only temporary, I said) even though it's not (anymore) for sale.  It's there because I didn't want to hoist it back onto the top shelf after getting it down thinking I'd sell it.

I thought it sounded special sometimes and might be keeping for that reason, I rationalized to my self.  Plus it's one of the cooler pieces of CD playing engineering ever, along with it's even more monsterous brother, the PD-95.  A friend was selling CD "dampers" for a decade.  I think it's ridiculous that such a tweak would help, but the Pioneer was doing the job the only correct way, by clamping the disc to a relatively heavy and damped platter.  So if having a stable platter was a big deal (and if you've ever seen a CD spin in a typical player, buzzing and all, you might think so) this was THE way to do it.  But after that, everyone just relied on digital processing to clean things up, which we now take for granted.  My friend positively hated the Pioneer and said it wasn't as good as his dampers on a Sony player (his favorite player from then and decades later was the Sony 990, a cheaply built player he started recommending to me as an "essential" upgrade only months after I'd purchased my first sort of "high end" CD player, the Sony 507 ESD, which had been his recommendation for the preceding 2 years...I still have the 507 and modified the drawer mechanism to eliminate the pesky "drawer sticking" problem...I consider the 507 my reference "early" CD player...it uses dual 1541A's in 8x oversampling, what converter you get in the 990 depends on which 990, either early AD or sony's own 1990 generation, which curiously enough was probably produced not only in the city I've lived in since 1992, but on the opposite side of the freeway from where I worked for 23 years, at least until Sony shut down their US semiconductor operations around 2001...I remember them shutting down and leaving the lot vacant for many years...that was when all the unique Sony made 1-bit converters used in the likes of the SCD-1 disappeared, and even Sony SACD players switched to using off-the-shelf multibit sigma delta converters from the likes of Analog Devices...while I believe those final 1-bits are the most special (as in "magical", not necessarily "accurate") of the lot for DSD/64 because it's native 1bit with 10x oversampling...1 bit "all the way" so to speak...which is why I hold on to my currently inoperative regularly laser eating DVP-9000ES as the poor man's version of the SCD-1...possibly useful for the ultimate 24/96 transcriptions of my SACD's using that uniquely good--or bad--approach).

(My feeling is that Sony ultimately concluded the full on 1-bit systems were just too expensive because of the necessary power supply heft to get them to work right.  The 9000ES was the least heavy ES player to ever use this technology, and it weighed 30 pounds with copper chassis and everything.  This was true of the previous decade of top end Sony CD players as well.  IOW, the true 1-bit technology just was not scalable, in addition to having a bunch of curious very low level problems at high frequencies (idle tones) which are probably not important or perhaps even euphonic....perhaps best to leave those in there just as with the ripples in linear phase PCM decoding.  Then you get the full magic, just as when SCD-1 was introduced.  But also it was just deciding their separate US semiconductor operation simply cost Sony too much, and it already looked like they weren't going to rule the world with 1 bit audio, though they just might do so for high resolution video...which was being done elsewhere and they wanted to focus on that.  Perhaps those business considerations were even the only reason.  Or, perhaps multibit DSD/64 reproduction was better, which seems to be what everyone but me thinks.  Though PS Audio has sold converters derived from the original Sony approach for some time, so I'm not the only one thinking it might be special.)

*****

So now the PD-75 has an actual "purpose" though I think it hardly justifies having such a valuable player "just" for copying a few CD's onto my harddrive after conversion to analog via the PD-75 and back to digital on the DA-3000.  So far only one CD has needed this special treatment.

My earlier rationalization was merely that it might make some discs sound better, presumably because of some euphonic alteration (such as peak unlimiting...Pioneer is a nicely oversampled player with good enough electronics to do the high oversampling it does..."Legato Link").

If there is such a euphonic effect, I believe I can capture it sufficiently (just like anything else) at 24/96.

In sighted testing, I always feel the Pioneer is special.  And it also makes less mechanical noise than just about any player.  That may be the key benefit.  Probably players like Esoteric are quieter still (and Estoric had a mechanism that was similar in concept to the PD-75 but even more elaborate and heavy).