[Anonamemouse]

Thanks Steve, any explanation (although I'll try to look it up)why a slower burned CD is more stable than a faster burn, although they have the same information?

Robert

imagine that you are walking, and every fifth step you have to paint a circle black.
as long as you are just strolling you'll have no problem accomplishing this perfectly, you'll stay within the lines, make sure everything inside the circle is nice and black, not a single spot missed out.
now imagine having to do the same thing while running at top speed. you'll get a splatter of paint roughly in the right direction, but you'll half miss the circle, and only half of the inner circle will be covered...

[vegasdave]

The sound quality from a CD player depends on many factors, but one of them is how well they perform on-the-fly realtime error correction, as opposed to non-realtime error correction used when ripping a CD to a hard drive or making a CD-R copy from it.
 
CDs have an aluminum substrate layer with physically stamped pits representing the digital information.  CD-Rs have a dye mask layer on top of an aluminum layer, and the laser burning process records the digital information as either transparent or opaque areas in the mask.
 
Although the dye mask layer in CD-Rs will be less stable over time compared to the stamped layer of physical pits in a CD, they are actually easier for the laser to read, and require less realtime error correction.
 
Steve

Cool, thanks Steve.

[Mag]

I've been thinking, doesn't copy control by major music distributers put the future of computer based music in doubt?
Sure it's fine for average joe public but for Hi-Fi application, even Hi-Rez downloads can be encrypted. Thus it will only sound its best on a platform with software that conforms to copy control restrictions. You can never be sure that your computer hasn't been corrupted by downloading just one song that is encoded.
This is one reason I abandoned computer based play. Freed from viruses, crashes and computer copy control software.