do burnt CD copys sound as good as originals?

To say that there is no difference merely because a bit for bit copy is being made is difficult to sustain. This argument should apply to all things digital. With this logic, all CD players should sound the same, and all digital cables since it's just bits that are being moved around. Well, we know that's not true, because the timing of the bits as measured by jitter can cause CD players to sound different.

There actually is no difference in a digital recording and a digital copy of the same digital recording....jitter and different sounding CD players come from other factors like the differing clock accuracy, power supply and D to A circuitry between players. This has been proven many times over. Digital data storage is the basis for banking, communications and a whole host of modern technologies...digital data correctly copied (without errors) will perfectly preserve the original digital data - no loss and no difference.

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.