Do CD-R's sound the same as originals

Ezmeraldall, I suppose dye matters to the extend that some manufacturers obviously did a better job. What I mean is that on Memorex I had to throw out several CDRs after copying since they were unreadable. I generally have had no such problems with Sony or Smart & Friendly or TDK or Nashua (even with 80 minutes disks). Originals reflect light better than CDRs that in turn are more reflective than CDRW. So I would assume that CDRWs have the potential to introduce more errors than CDRs and thus the quality could degrade more. I really have no way to tell what happens in reality, as I have no equipment to verify if all bits were transferred OK to the copy. To my ears copies usually sound indistinguishable from the original even through my Sennheiser HD600 headphones. Of course, my source is a modified Sony ES player, so it is not top of the line in many respects - that might be masking some very subtle differences that other people might be hearing indeed - I also agree with the other people here who said recording at lower speed (1x) should be better than higher speed. Obviously there is some difference in the way CDR/CDRW disks are perceived by players (both computer and audio) as they take significantly longer to initialize (read the number of tracks and start playing) than original CDs. I don't know why. I usually copy CDs from one CD-ROM to the CD burner directly and do not go through the hard drive. If I'm making a mix from several CDs, I usually make it piece by piece on a rewritable CD and then copy the whole thing to a CDR if I want to keep it. Sometimes I just leave it on the CDRW that my player reads OK too. This way if there are problems I don't waste the blank. I get almost 100% playable copies when I do a disc copy. Where I get problems sometimes is mixing CDs so if I do the mixing on a rewritable CD first, then verify it is OK and then copy the whole CD I'm almost certain it will work as audio CD. Kocho

For CDR technology to be useful as a computer data media requires vanishingly small rate of uncorrectable errors during the transcription. When was the last time you had a "bad" data or program file on a CD? This means the post-correction error rate must far better than 1 bit in every 10 billion. (In round numbers, there's about 5 billion bits of data on a CD). If the post-correction error rate were not that low, CD-R would not be reliable enough for use in the computer industry. When I say "correction", I mean recovery of the original data provided by the error-correction coding used for both audio and data CD formats. Think about it: a computer program will not tolerate interpolation of bad data. So no way is an alleged difference in sound due to data errors, unless consumer CD-R burners are truly, truly, crappy and do have much higher data error rates as compared to computer burners and CD-ROMs. A different issue is whether clock jitter differs when reading CD-R vs a stamped CD.

I would add to the response of 1439bhr the following: There might not be any errors on the copy. In fact as 14 says there should not be any. However, the reflective properties of CDR and CDRW are different than these of regular CDs. This is the main reason some audio players do not read them at all. Others misinterpret quite a few bits because of difficulties reading them. They have error correction algorythms that are meant originally to correct erors due to scratches, vibrations and dust. That is how audio data ends up interpolated and hence the sound might be inferior. Of course jitter remains a factor too... Kocho

I think CDRs sound fine for listening to MP3 sources or in the car. On my home system they are clearly marginal. Why? I think the primary reason is jitter. The CD burners clearly don't have the jitter specification that the original stamping process had. Stereophile ran tests about 5 years ago during a controversy that centered around whether different CD plants produced better/worse CDs from the same master source. BMC was the target of those complaints. The bottom line was that the various copies were absolutely identical bit for bit but they sounded different. That was the time when the significance of jitter was just becoming apparent. So it the pits are shifted ever so slightly because of a not absolutely accurate spin speed a phase shift or random jitter can be introduced.

Good point about reflectivity. Too bad that $200 CD burners can outperform big buck audio players :-( Concering error correction algorithms: notice I used the term "correctable error": this is an error which is detected by the error correction algorithm and CORRECTABLE -- the original data word is restored to its proper value. I won't go into technicalities, but the use of redundant bits allows this. For example in an (11,8) code, 11 bits are recorded to represent 8 bits of data input; at playback time an 11 bit is read and the error correction algorithms decides which 8 bit word was intended. It can perfectly correct any single bit error out of the 11 bits, but if a pair of bit errors happen within that 11 bit word, all it can determine is that an uncorrectable error has occurred. If 3 bits out of the 11 are in error, the algorithm cannot recognize the situation and the wrong 8-bit word is output. An uncorrectable error is one in which the algorithms has to "fake it" via interpolation, or in really bad cases, shuts down the output.