CD-R's vs. CD-RW's

If you are referring to mp3's then it does not matter because mp3's sound terrible anyway. They are convenient and free but they do not sound good. Most people don't notice because they consider their computer and altec computer speakers hi-fi. I have used both cd and cdr and it doesn't really matter.

Mp3's sound amazingly good this guy is clueless. Download the songs at the highest bitrate you can which is 320. Then record onto a gold disc. If you play them for freinds I bet they will never know which is the mp3 or not. Oh yeah in case you don't know you have to convert them to a wav file first. But I'm sorry I don't know how many times you can record over cd-rw before you start noticing a loss of sound quality. but why worry about it there pretty dang cheap. You can afford to use them a few times and then just chuck em.

Rockbox was not clueless>. He just said it bluntly. A CD file is about 50Meg, while the MP3 counterpart is only 4Meg! This means that there is less information in MP3.

If one cannot distinguish between a original CD recording and one made from MP3, either he is using a 'lo-fi' system or he doesn't have a pair of 'high-end' ears.

Obviously we have a few uneducated people when it comes to mp3's here. If you download a high bitrate file and you have a high quality soundcard they sound excellent. I use the TOSLINK output on my soundcard and feed it directly to my DAC. If the mp3 file was encoded properly the sound quality should be excellent. It's not as easy as just saying "mp3's suck". a 320 kbit/sec mp3 file is right around a 50% compression of the original. Compared to dvd's, minidisc, etc. this is a very low amount of compression. I've encoded several of my audiophile cd's to mp3's and then played them back side by side with the originals and only a couple of times have I noticed any difference and even then it was enough to leave me doubting whether or not the difference existed.

Grumpybb - what sound card are you using? For some reason the SB series (not exactly high-end) will only output 48K which obviously implies a conversion going on. I've hesitated to buy a high-end sound card for $400 or so because you're paying a lot for incoming sampling for recording and a bunch of stuff I probably won't do. I just want to read the bits from the CD and output them directly (digitally) at 44.1Kb, and am looking for an appropriately priced card that will do that well.

I am using the soundcard that came with my computer. It is a Sony VAIO PC-V308. It is 2 years old now. I don't think the newer VAIO's come with it anymore. I wanted to get a Zefiro ZA2 soundcard but my computer doesn't have any ISA slots which is necessary for the Zefiro.