Just a couple of points. CD-Rs are only less expensive to produce than pressed CDs if you're talking about production runs under 1000 or so. There is NO difference whatsoever in the sound quality of the recordings. And, while there have been some reports of degradation with early CD-Rs, I haven't encountered any over the past couple of years. And all the CD-R's I produce carry a lifetime warranty.
      I, too, am sure that Topic can do a better (I'm not so sure about far better) job than I can; that's why I don't plan to duplicate anything that Topic releases. I'd like to point out, though, that CAMSCO has been making this music available (with proper packaging) for some four years now. Topic won't release anything until 2009.
    The sound quality of the FOLKTRAX recordings varies from pretty good (on the stuff that was recorded after, say, 1955 ) to absolutely dreadful, as on the James Madison Carpenter collection of sea songs, which were recorded on a Dictaphone back in the 1920s. The people that are interested in this early material don't expect good quality sound..and probably never would get it. Remastering really bad-quality
recordings tends to lose most of the original sound in an attempt to make it "clean"