Burning cd's for my modestly high-end system...

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.

Hi, in my professional DVD copiers I have found the following:
Pioneer 112 sounds better than any other under $60 burner, and the LG (frgot the model) "top of the line DVD burner" sounds better than that at $89.
As for the disc, in CDs TDK and Tascam sound very similar and I'de use nothing less. However for taste the Maxell's have tubey mid-bloom.
There are gold discs that sound much better in total balance than either of those, but those are the least I'd use.
Place your computer on some type of zorb pucks as there's alot there that can cause mechanical or electro-mechanical vibrations.
There's a few other things, like demag the discs, or put them on a disc lathe to perfectly cutting them.
I will only speak of the actual physical end of it and I guarenty that this will make a dif to even a Sony boom box as a playback device. Especially the choice of disc; where as the other features may take better gear to detect. But if a Rotel (which I liked) can, than the $500 players are either worth the investment or not.
Forgive me being jaded.

Celtic, I've been using Memorex Black CD-Rs exclusively for the past 2 years and never had a bad disc. Burn on lowest possible speed.
I also use Mitsui discs.
BTW, Matsui is a baseball player in NY Yankees :)

You are right though, CD-Rs sound different and for some recordings I do prefer Memorex Black because I found them to sound a bit smoother than Mitsui.

I burn CDs using Nero7. I like it better than Roxio.

Must respectfully disagree with the "CDs are CDs" claim. Stick with name brand such as TDK, Maxell, Sony, Fuji, Imation, etc. Office Depot, Memorex and those of the ilk are prone to error and will miss track and pop more readily. And they do sound differently under close scrutiny. The Matsui are probably the best of the lot, but expensive.

I'm with Elevick. Your quality may already be compromised. Furthermore, downloading music without paying is illegal. Don't do it. Everything you do can be traced and is backed up and stored on servers somewhere => your IP address identifies you. And the tools and technology to catch people is getting BETTER and FASTER. It is only a matter of time before these activities get caught. It is only the sheer volume that slows the process down and may mean that people are given amnesty. (Just read the newspaper about the way they are now catching child porn and you will see that technology is being developed to track/catch people.)

In Canada there is a levy on every blank CD-R to fund artists - yep believe it or not if you are HONEST then in Canada you get SCREWED and pay TWICE...once when you download from iTunes and AGAIN when you buy blank CD-R. So I understand Canadians who feel that free downloading is completely justfied...Go Figure!!

Are you downloading compressed music? Most of Limewire is mp3. That's this biggest problem I see.

TY for your thread.Sounds good to me.Sounds like I won't need to make any upgrades at the moment.
But,you mentioned HD,meaning high definition I assume.Guess I would have to have a cd player that decodes high def.I'm using an old rotel that plays cdr's but don't think it's a high def player.
Will Roxio 9 make HD cd's and if so would buying a HD player and burning HD cd's make a big difference in sound from my system?

The software and the format is the most important issue. Unless you want really HD quality. CDs are CDs and Roxio will do a good job of that, but your recordings will be subject to the quality limitations of CDs.

Changing drives could speed up the process and perhaps improve reliability of the drive, but that may not matter unless you plan to produce a lot of CDs. The drive will not change the quality, in general.

I'm getting a Korg MR-1000 so that I can record my LPs at 5.6mHz and then archive them on a separate hard drive (at least after the 40G internal HD starts to fill) and make DVD-A discs for playback on systems other than my main 2-channel system. I'll also use the Korg for some playback and live recording.

If you're just making CDs of downloads, then your current drives and software should work fine.

Dave