Do CD-R's sound the same as originals

eber, half of your arguments are flawed and convoluted, and therefore your credibility is near-zero. I have no reason to believe that what you think you hear is accurate or just a figment of your imagination. In my system, which is a very good system, properly recorded CD-Rs are indistiguishable from CDs. If you want to convince other people with your views I strongly suggest you tone done your message, quit "shouting" at people with your large-caps, stop threatening them physically (and minimize the risk of getting bashed) and read you posts before hitting that return key to check the logic before you say foolish things.

Okay, I'll quit saying that I fully believe / agree with everyone stating that they hear differences. I'm also more than happy to grant anyone who has the opinion that CDRs sound worse and that's just a fact of life the right to do so. As any of this pertains to audio, I'm just an enthusiast and like to discuss the various topics. In my professional life, I run a software development department responsible for the collection, processing and delivery of financial information from and to around the globe. Centrally, we handle transaction rates into the tens of thousands per second, and experience data rates in the tens of megabits per second of data. If we miss a single trade on Intel, we hear about it from the clients. If we were to screw up a price and deliver it to clients, we're in deep doo doo. All of this done in an environment that is loaded with every acronym audiophiles have come to fear. What's more, when something does go wrong, we can find exactly where and what went wrong and preclude it from happening again. The same concepts apply to getting a price from the East Timor silk futures market and delivering it Scandanavia as do to reading a CD or CDR and delivering it to a DAC even though the engineered solution is different. For anyone who's curious about the handling of digital music and is wondering how best to spend their money over the next few years, these are important concepts to understand. I'm totally convinced that in some short number of years, the notion of current transport technology will be obsolete, replaced and bettered by something costing a small fraction of a current high-end transport. In the meantime, that solution doesn't exist today, and being an audio enthusiast I want the best I can have today while understanding that money spent today is money that I could spend tomorrow.

Kthomas...I hear ya. I understand that when you "look" at the data bits they appear identical. I cannot tell you why, however, these same bits on CDR do not "sound" the same as the originals. There could not be any question of that when heard over my system. There have been valid possible reasons explained on this board...but we may not know the truth for some time. I do know that CDR's sound different than burned audio discs which sound different (slightly) from original. The degree of difference is entirely subjective (some say who cares and don't notice much degradation). I am someone who has spent a great deal of money and time to reach audio "nirvana"...as I'm sure many others on Audiogon have. I wish that I was satisfied with the CDR's....I could go back to a $200 sony cdp and be happy...NOT!

As noted, I make my CD-Rs on a $600. Pioneer W739-- ie consumer grade. I have 4 CD players and CD-Rs and originals sound different on all of them. They include Levinson 37 Transport and 360S DAC, Sony XA7ES (now sold), Sony 9ES, and of course the pioneer recorder. CD-Rs played back on the Levinson system sound best and I can't really hear any significant difference between them and the originals. The XA7ES is very good also. Playback on the consumer grade stuff sounds worse on both originals and CD-Rs. This seems consistent to me. Interestingly, while the W739 makes excellent copies, it does not sound that great when playing back the copies. I'd guess it's optimized for copying. Craig.

Did you check the copies bit for bit ?