I put sheets of styrofoam above and below my CD drive in my PC and then 2 large chunks under the PC tower and it made a noticeable improvement (cheap vibration control). Also try Herbie's Black Hole CD Mat.
The best sounding CD-R's according to my ears are:
Taiyo Yuden (Maxell PRO and some Maxell Music CD-R's are TY)
Mitsui/MAM-A (also rebranded as MoFi, HHB, and Apogee)
Ricoh (even the ones made in Taiwan sound good)
...maybe others that I don't know about
While all CD-R's carry the same bits, they do induce varying degrees of jitter into the playback stream if they are of inferior quality.
The best sounding CD-R's according to my ears are:
Taiyo Yuden (Maxell PRO and some Maxell Music CD-R's are TY)
Mitsui/MAM-A (also rebranded as MoFi, HHB, and Apogee)
Ricoh (even the ones made in Taiwan sound good)
...maybe others that I don't know about
While all CD-R's carry the same bits, they do induce varying degrees of jitter into the playback stream if they are of inferior quality.