Re: Gargoyle - I think he's side-stepping the original question and saying the CD format is obsolescent and being replaced by higher density formats like DVD (including video) SA-CD, DSD etc.

For all the new developments, the original CD-Audio standard hasn't changed and is what you get when you buy a music CD to play in a regular CD player.

Re Malcolm's compatibility issue: several reasons:
- Some older CD players won't play CDR's reliably because they weren't designed to do that (the contrast ratio of CDR's is lower)
- Old CDR blanks weren't so well made. New ones are more reliable
- CDRs deteriorate with age. Again older types may be worse in that respect.
- Some brands of CDR blanks are still better than others, and some CD burners are better than others

All of this has nothing to do with sound quality. A CD either plays perfectly, or it skips and stutters (or in bad cases doesn't play at all).
There's a very borderline case where errors are too bad to be correctable but not so bad as to cause the player to mute or stop altogether, where the player will attempt to interpolate and you'll get inferior sound, but I don't believe that happens much on any CD that's good enough to play without skipping.

Anahata