Madisonears - I'll find the exact steps and software I use at home and then post them here. The software is all free, at least in trial version, and by doing so we can be sure we're comparing apples to apples. A general process I've been through several times is extracting song files to the hard drive, which can then be mixed and matched and written back to CDR's. I can extract the same file, say, 10 times using the same software and different software, and then run a compare program against any two of the resulting extracted files. The compare program doesn't know the source of the files, it just dutifully does a bit-wise comparison of the contents. I have never had any problem with getting all N copies to compare identically. Now, I admit to extrapolating from my experiments to my day-to-day copying - I don't compare the files each time I make a copy. In any case, since I typically copy whole CD's to put in a "jukebox" and since nobody but Sony utilizes the CD Text capability of CDs, I do a song-by-song extraction / copy so that I can insert title and song info. Alternatively, you can just make a straight copy of the CD in a single pass - I have never attempted to extract the whole CD image to the hard drive multiple times using different software and comparing the image, but I have little doubt that it would work as well. Another experiment worth trying (so maybe I will :-) ) would be to do the same thing using a CDR itself as the original - there has been speculation that there is something about the physical nature of a CDR vs. a CD that makes it more prone to sounding different. I can't formulate a hypothesis on why that would be, but I'd want to try it for myself first. -Kirk
