Also consider your source material - if you listen to a lot of older analog recordings, the remastering for CD may not have been done well and a lot of new/current pop stuff is just cookie cutter pressed out (and is very highly compressed).

Smaller budget and older analog recordings may have been done on lesser quality recording medium as well (not everyone could afford/had access to 2" 30ips tape/hardware). And there is sometimes (often?) printthrough on analog masters if not stored correctly (tail out tape before storage and use leaders at least twice the circumference of the takeup between calibration tones and program material so when wound, there is two layers of magnetically "neutral" material between tone and pgm)

Some labels (EMI everywhere in the world outside of the US, for instance) intentionally create errors on their CDs and don't conform to RedBook audio standards in an effort to slow copying of the discs.

Lastly, a friend of the family was complaining that his CD burner must have been broken because the copies of his discs he made to take in the car didn't sound as good as the originals - turns out he was using Windows Media Player to rip the tracks to compressed WMA files, then burning the CDs from those. *slaps my head*

Seems the jazz, blues and classical guys get the biggest wow out of their investment, since the engineering of those discs seem to be a labour of love and not as profit-motivated as commercial radio-type music.

Bren R.