Need opinions on duping CD's

"opinions on duping CD"

Just one: for copyrighted titles, it's ILLEGAL. 

It is not illegal to copy your own music for yourself, whether to move CDs to a music server, make a "mix tape", or just have a backup. The key is that the duplication is for your personal use.

It only becomes technically illegal when you pass the copy (or original) to someone else while keeping one for yourself.

Now, as a practical matter, the used CD market has been active for decades without problem. The record companies have no interest in running down used CD sellers to see if they kept a copy for themselves. The record companies only become interested when they discover mass duplication. The most infamous example was the Napster MP3 "peer to peer" music sharing service back in the late 1990s in which a single file upload could be downloaded thousand of times. This lead to a number of lawsuits which bankrupted the original Napster. (They are a completely different service these days.)

So, if you are only making copies for your personal use, don’t sweat it.

Edit: note the rules are different for commercial video DVDs since that requires one to break the encoded copy protection of the files. This is technically illegal even for personal use, though if you are just doing for yourself (say to copy movies to a personal server) no one is going to waste any time chasing your down. It is again the distribution to many others that stirs the pot.

"...Or, burn a CD or DVD with the wav files you want..."

DOS: diskcopy

Ripping CDs to HD is legal as long as you have one copy that paid royalties - original CD or "Audio CD-R" copy (cheap).

Copy can be better than original since most of CDPs can only read given sector once, operating in real time.  With longer scratches CDP might start to interpolate missing data.  Ripping program can go to the same sector hundreds of times to recover it.  That way copy can be better than original and you can even recover completely unplayable CDs.

hollowman. Good nickname. Very appropriate.
It sounds music deprived.  Probably thought that the old iTunes download system was per play.  

Responding to OP:
Dupes done on a computer as suggested by spalialking usually sound better than orig.
Dupes made on a CD recorder don't. And the record companies "tax" blanks to death.