Bit perfect copies

I use to burn cd-r's directly from the source and I heard clicks and other occasional distortions. I now extract the music from the source and save it onto the computer. I then burn it a 1X (the original speed) and they sound excellent. Also some brands of cd-r's cause problems with auto and high end cd players. I find Sony CD-R's to be the best and most reliable for audio. Memorex is not very good, TDK are blue in color and some audio cd players won't recognize them.

I too have had problems with cheap CDR's. The blue ones that I bought in bulk would skip terribly especially on my car and portable machines. I switched to SONY (silver in slim cases) and have had much better luck ( still only around $.75 each)

There are several audio CD-R units on the market that sell for about $350. There was an ad in the Sunday paper from either Good Guys or Circuit City for a Phillips unit, and Sony has recently brought out the RCD-W1. (The RCD-W1 also has a special offer thru July 31st for a free 20-pack of audio CD-R disks.) I recently bought the RCD-W1 so I can transfer a lot of my vinyl collection onto CD, but have not had the chance to play with it yet. As others have commented above, all of the units do a perfectly adequate job of copying -- but don't expect them to be great playback decks.

Scott, it would be great if you would report on the RCD-W1 when you've had a chance to record some vinyl with it. This unit tempts me, but I've wondered if I'd have to spend money for a pro machine to do justice to LPs. From the promo blurbs, it doesn't sound like the RCD-W1 uses the same A to D technology as their new, pro unit, but who can tell from that stuff? -- Jayson

Some of the answers above aren't exactly true. Most CD-r burners don't make perfect bit for bit copies and can introduce errors as multiple generations are produced. This is in part due to the large amount of data involved with digital audio. The only way I've seen to make true bit for bit exact audio copies of CD's is to use a PC (or MAc) with software that does DAE (digital audio extraction) from the CD and then reburns that data onto the CD-r. Exact Audio Copy is company that makes the only software that I'm familar with that checks the extracted audio bit for bit with the original to make sure the copy is exact.