Fredman - You are on to something in your last message where you talk about burning your CD-Rs at slower speeds. I own a commercial media duplication company, and we duplicate hundreds of CDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs, and videotapes each month. You will get a better duplicate disc if you duplicate your media at 1X or 2X play speed.
I've learned this from much experience the "hard way". No matter what some some computer weenie tells you - there is no way you are going to duplicate a decent sounding disc at 16X or 32X!!! All of these faster burn speeds were mostly brought about due to the inability of the computer market to come up with a reasonably fast back-up system. So they decided some time ago to start writing data - rather than audio - backups at higher speeds and a few "time challenged" audio types "thought" they could do the same thing. While it is possible to duplciate audio CDs at higher speeds - the quality almost always suffers greatly. If you are looking for quality CDRs, I can also suggest you look into buying Mitsui, Tao Yuden, Maxell, and Sony. My comapny has tried virtually all the commercial brands and find the overall quality control on the above mentioned brands to be quite consistent from one batch to the next.
I've learned this from much experience the "hard way". No matter what some some computer weenie tells you - there is no way you are going to duplicate a decent sounding disc at 16X or 32X!!! All of these faster burn speeds were mostly brought about due to the inability of the computer market to come up with a reasonably fast back-up system. So they decided some time ago to start writing data - rather than audio - backups at higher speeds and a few "time challenged" audio types "thought" they could do the same thing. While it is possible to duplciate audio CDs at higher speeds - the quality almost always suffers greatly. If you are looking for quality CDRs, I can also suggest you look into buying Mitsui, Tao Yuden, Maxell, and Sony. My comapny has tried virtually all the commercial brands and find the overall quality control on the above mentioned brands to be quite consistent from one batch to the next.