Do CD-R's sound the same as originals

And it should be pointed out that the original CD was stamped all at once, and NOT spinning at full speed and having the data burned by a laser into a photo emulsive substrate. So, when a CD-R is "burned", we are talking about it first being read at the full 1x speed, and THEN written at the full 1x speed. And there are a myriad of other factors, such as the light passing thru the "decidedly NOT 'optical lens quality' polycarbonate", TWICE (once to read, once to write, with the writing energy level of light much higher than the reading energy level...all at full speed)...the various reflective properties of the gold or silver reflective layer (those are the only two materials used, no CD-R's use aluminum), the various opacity properties of the different dies used in the photo emulsive substrate. And also, how all of this affects the "jitter performance", which as pointed out above, can be both mechanically-interface-related, and also can take place in the digital domain during the data transfer through the circuitry. My point is, there is NO such thing as a "perfect copy" of anything ANYWHERE, simple physics (and the uncertainty principle) dictate this. Also, my brother is both an EE and a computer programmer, and he informs me that a data CD has much higher tolerance for errors than an audio CD, because of the nature of the error correction of the software (it does perform heavy interpolation to correct for errors...no personal computer would function at all, if this weren't the case).

Sorry, but you surely misinterpreted your brother's words. The physical CD-ROM format, IEC 10149, has more error correction levels especially because of the fact that a single, logically irreparable error is fatal to software. CD-ROM error correction definitely does not allow for interpolated data.

Except it's mostly correct. When modems transfer data they do simple error detection/correction like the (11,8) method mentioned above. If there is an unrecoverable error, the word is resent. I wonder if data roms will also rescan a disc when an unrecoverable error is detected while the transport in an audio CD will simply interpolate. Just a thought. This came up in a previous thread and someone actually did some experiments with strait digital dumps. It was interesting and highly (in my mind) unexpected.

Dshin answers my question as I make my post... Still wondering if audio cd's could theoretically use the same IEEE standards for ripping the bits and then buffering the data for output into the DAC. Actually, doesn't Levinson do something like this?

My brother believes that the data is RE-SENT (when an unrecoverable error is detected) during the writing process for a data CD-R, and NOT done so during the writing of an audio CD-R. SORRY, but you surely misinterpreted what you think you might have learned thusfar, Dshin.