New decade, end of the CD?

CDs and CD-Rs both hold data as 1's and 0's, they have roughly the same storage space. As such CD-Rs could hold the exact same data as a CD, and hence should sound the same. Yes, you can burn an audio CD with mp3s, but you can also use wavs or lossless formats, or directly copy the contents of a CD. The difference between a pressed CD and a burned CD is something to do with what the CDs are made of. CD-R's supposedly can last longer than a CD if taken proper care of, but scratch much easier. 

I continue to buy CDs and it is my preferred form of music consumption (although vinyl is rising in my books and has almost equalled it, if it weren't so damned expensive!). It all comes down to personal choice. This thread is about attempting to guess the future and how long CDs will still be around, but on a personal level it comes down to your own preferences.

CD vs. CD-R

CD vs. mp3

Those discussions have nothing to do with each other. CD-Rs contain the exact same audio data as CDs. So when you make a CD-R copy of a CD, by definition it will sound exactly the same as the CD. In one of your posts (Bronsonia) you mentioned that they sound worse, that's when the discussion started. Later you conflated CD-Rs with mp3 - that doesn't follow at all. Like I said above, CDs and copied CDs have exactly the same audio content. MP3 comes into play when you "rip" a CD (or CD-R) to your computer and convert the content to MP3 in the process. The resulting files no longer contain the same information as the CD (or CD-R), in order to save space a so called "lossy compression algorithm" is applied which removes much of the audio information. This compression algorithm has several parameters, most notably the bitrate, or in simple terms the size of the resulting files. If you choose a very low bitrate, the files will be very small, but since so much information has been removed, the audio quality is severely diminished. If you choose a high bitrate (about 256kpbs, which is currently also the standard in virtually all mp3 stores on the internet) the resulting quality is virtually identical to the original CD (or CD-R). If you ask yourself "how can this be, when as much as 2/3 of the information has been removed?" - here's how it's done:

In a nutshell, when we listen to music the brain is not processing all of the information - certain signals mask out others. We now know so much about how this works that we can remove the masked information. This doesn't work equally well on all types of music all the time, which is why we need a sufficiently high bitrate in order to be on the safe side - and there are other mechanisms as well, such as using files with variable bitrates, for which during the encoding phase the signal is analysed for complexity and the bitrate varied accordingly - so if the song has parts which are complex and parts which are simple, the bitrate can be varied, resulting in a file as small as a constant bitrate file, but with better quality in the complex parts.

Does that answer the question? So CDs and CD-Rs are virtually identical in terms of audio quality (but of course CD-Rs are much less durable) since they contain the same audio information, while MP3 is in principle worse since lossy compression is used, but with sufficiently high bitrates the audio is virtually indistinguishable from the original CD/CD-R. 

Agreed. 

Yep, pretty much - if looked after a CD-R will last a lot longer than 2 years, I too have CD-Rs that are >10 years old and still playable, but I would never use CD-R for data I want to keep indefinitely.

 

We've had the burn-speed debate before - if you're happy wasting hours on end buring at 1x speed, then I'm not going to stop you.

 

CD burner hardware is irrelevant - there are very few OEM manufacturers of CD transports and they are all of a muchness - the transport hardware in a hi-fi burner will be the same "quality" as the one in a PC.

 

I've sent an email to Maxell asking about the difference between CD-R Music and CD-R Data - as far as I am aware they are physically identical, the packaging is different because CD-R Music and CD-R Data have a Private Copying Levy (tax), and in some countries this is higher for CD-R Music (for example the USA & The Netherlands).

Maybe so, but irrelevant - you can make CD-R compilations at any burn-speed and it makes no difference but if you are happy taking 80 minutes to do this instead of less than 2 minutes then that's fine by me. The end result will be the same.