I am looking for a reliable objective test to indicate how well an audio CD-R was burnt (whether due to CD-R quality itself, the burner used, the way it was used or a combination of all three). I neither have "golden ears" nor time to listen carefully to multiple CDs which could be played on very diverse and unknown audio CD players, each possibly responding differently to a marginal or poorly burnt CD.

Does anyone have any experience to indicate how well C1 errors or jitter (as read on a PC drive with say Nero CD-DVD Speed) correlate with audio CD quality when played on a standalone player? I have already observed that C2 errors seem to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for an audio CD to be noisy when played on my standalone player.

My CD/DVD drive (Pioneer 110D) apparently cannot report C1 errors or jitter, only C2 errors.

Is there a better drive I could get to measure these values?

By "necessary and sufficient conditions" in my post, I mean that all CDs that show C2 errors also show audio noise, but some CDs have noise but no C2 errors. (Note that the C2 errors were observed on my CD/DVD burner, and the noise observed on my standalone player.)

I don´t know your drive but if it cannot report C1 there´s a
chance that you´re looking at CU and not C2 errors. For this
reason and to increase the quality of your burns I would suggest
you to get another drive (a Plextor PX-71x will do nicely) and
test again.

As I tried to explain before Peter, You are trying to find something that is not there, C-1 errors will not produce noise and jitter that is introduced during the burning process is minimal. Different transports, DA converters, etcetera, introduce anomalies that influence the final analog sound. That has nothing to do with what is burned to the disk. Error such as C-1 will only affect longetivity not sound. If you are concerned with or would like to read some more on jitter. Here are a few links.

http://www.digido.com/portal/pmodule...er_page_id=28/

http://www.jitter.de/english/engc_navfr.html

http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/jitter.htm

The errors I see are those reported by Nero CD-DVD Speed as C2 errors. I have no idea whether Speed is telling the truth or not. It does not report any errors as CU errors.

A key to my question is that I am testing on a different setup to what I (or someone else) will be playing on. What I am hoping for is that imperfections reported by Speed (or any other program for that matter) will be an indicator of fragility of the burnt CD. If C1 errors indicate longevity, as nmpaulcp suggests, when played on the same equipment (in other words sound quality will be affected sooner rather than later), why couldn't it indicate sound quality much sooner (e.g. now) on less tolerant equipment? My burner is apparently more tolerant than my standalone player because noise is not obvious on it even when playing those CDs that have C2 errors.

Kprobe only works with LiteOn drives. Should I get one of them for testing? Does it report C1, C2 and jitter with Speed?