CHAT ROOM

There can be a loss of quality with copying CD's too if they are copied at too fast a speed for the media or the laser needs a clean. You'll get errors introduced which will kill the clarity over time, but how quickly those errors accumulate I wouldn't know.

Mastering houses will reject a CD if they find it has too many errors on it and it's recommended (or at least it used to be before CD burners had huge buffers) to burn it at a slower speed to reduce them. I don't know what things are like now though as that's going back a few years.

The biggest problem with sound quality is when transcoding - converting one lossy format to another. I think people do this without realising it and it's best to avoid it if you can. Use a lossless format like flac, wav, apple lossless or wma lossless then convert to something else when you need to.

If you burn a CD from Mp3 (or any other lossy format) then you should label it so that people know it comes from a compressed audio format imho. Those sorts of CD's being passed around will cause problems over time too.

Mp3 > CD > Mp3 > CD > MP3, and before you know it all sounds like AM radio.