do burnt CD copys sound as good as originals?

That all makes sense, Shadorne, but I think that some of us have had contradicting experiences. I have a CD burner device, a Panasonic thing with two drawers. It's about 6 years old. When I use it to make compilations, they sound decidedly inferior to the originals. How come?

Take a look at this. If done right, I find that copies can sound better:

http://www.genesisloudspeakers.com/whitepaper/White%20Paper%20on%20Black%20CDs%20ver%203.1.pdf

Shadorne, if you'd care to do some reading, Genesisloudspeakers.com has a twenty four page technical article on this issue. Or you can just Google "White paper on black cds," it will be the first hit to come up. The author goes into rather exhaustive detail, so I'm not going to try and paraphrase his theorems. Whether you buy it or not, it's interesting reading.

Could sound better or worse depending on the relative quality of the two physical discs - but chances are you will not hear much difference - unless one disc is poorly made, scratched, off-center, warped, etc. Such discs would create higher error rate and jitter maybe?? I get a lot of transport noise from some discs - burned copies do not exhibit such noise.

I must say I can't hear a difference either, i just thought it was my poor hearing. A different issue is CD life. I have heard origonals have a longer life expectancy than copies. This is due to the less permanent method of burning CDs in a computer, any thoughts?