Burnin CDs? Sound loss/degration question

I bought the Yamaha CRW-F1 CD recorder. I don't recall where I bought it--it was online somewhere and was not terribly expensive (under $300 I believe). Of course you can get a recorder for much less, but this one suited my needs and has performed remarkably well.

I can recommend the Marantz CDR500 Pro too. I can't tell the difference between the originals and copies when made at either 1X or 2X, and it's very easy to use too; MSRP $850. and street price about $675. I've used mainly Maxell or Sony CDR blanks. Cheers. Craig

There was just an article in "The audiophile voice" where several brands of blanks were compared and the results noted. The main advice was, copy to the hard drive first and then to the blank. Why would this be better? I've made copies on my computer that no one can tell the difference. And they were not copied to the hard drive first. The main thing that I have learned is, use a name brand blank, and copy no faster than 4X

I get Mitsuis online at Terrapin Tapes. www.ttapes.com. They are definitely the best!

Sogood51 was correct in mentioning that the quality can be affected by the burning process. Jitter on playback can be reduced by altering the method by which CDR's are recorded, and this process can potentially offer an increase of dynamic range of a 16 bit recording by more than 20db.

I have quoted from a recent article discussing Yamaha's Audio Master Quality Recording below;

"Yamaha decided to deal with this by creating a process they called Audio Master. They decided to artificially slow down the speed of burning by increasing the length of the pits and lands. Although the disc is still spinning at its 24x or 32x speed, the density of bits on the CD's goes down. The normal 1.2 m/s linear speed turns into 1.4 m/s. 74 minute discs suddenly only hold 63 minutes, and 80 minute discs now only hold 68 minutes due to the extended pit length. Although the feature sizes are increased, they're still within Red Book standards. Now the reader's laser has more room with which to sample and determine if it's actually looking at a pit or a land."

Link to the full article >here