Do CD-R's sound the same as originals

Carl, I was not attempting to hurt your feelings. I was just stating the facts and if your feeling were hurt by it, well, that is all about you and not me. In general terms, "I could care less". However, I try to keep an open mind and I was interested in other people's finding that are "experts". Anyway, never mind!

Mfgrep, jitter is not a quality of the code itself. You cannot introduce jitter into a CD. It is not there. Jitter is produced when you decode it. You cannot introduce anything into the CD-R unless your copying hardware/software are grossly inadequate. The CD-R is an exact, I repeat exact, replica of the original CD. Any difference in sound can only come from the way your CD player reads CDs versus CD-Rs and not from the CD-R itslef. Comprende ?

Yes...now everyone...are you recording onto CDR's???...or onto the audio format CD's which are made for the audio components (as opposed to computer burners) ????????????

Remember, Kthomas, that a computer's transport doesn't really need to concern itself with timing the way a DAC might. From what I understand, jitter is introduced when the periods of the signal stream that the transport is outputting becomes different from that which the DAC expects. By the way, I have no idea exactly what the heuristic is for either a CD-ROM or and audio CD transport reading the bits off a disk. Does anyone know of a good reference for an explanation?

Mfgrep - all my experience is with computer CDRs. I used to have one of the Phillips dual-tray copier machines which required the audio media, but I don't still have it to run any kind of comparison test with. There is physically no difference between the two media, just a bit that is set saying this is an audio CD and therefore can be used in an audio CD recorder. Computer CDR drives don't pay any attention to that bit, and computer CDR media doesn't set it. Robba - absolutely understood. There are three "chunks" - reading the media, getting the data to the DAC and then what the DAC does with the data. All my comments have related only to the first chunk. You're correct that jitter is introduced in a different chunk - namely, the second one. Jitter is of the nature you describe - both the sending and the receiving device have to "clock" the data, and if they are out of sync, you can get "lost" or bad data. Since there is no retry logic, the DACs two choices are to play the bad data or throw it away, either of which would cause audible degradation if it happened very often. One solution seen on some high end transport / DAC combos is cabling that forces the two clocks to act as one, thereby eliminating lack of synchronization. This is a better solution if you're limited to "send and pray" transmissions, but there are much better methods by implementing redundancy into the system. There has to be retry capability, or multiple copies of the data sent so that it has to fail on all connections before the data can't be processed. There are a number of strategies that can be employed with a small re-engineering of the interface, and that have been deployed in other communications-related applications. In any case, the main point of parts of this thread is that the first chunk (reading the data) is a "solved" problem, at least when using computer CD drives, and that if a CDR sounds different than the original CD it's either because 1) the copy wasn't "perfect", or 2)some as yet unexplained aspect of current CD transport /player intereactions with CDR media that differs from CD media.