Hi. I recently made backups of a couple of CDs by The Corrs, after running ClonyXXL I found only rudimentary copy protection and was able to copy it using CloneCD with no hassle.

On playing it, some songs were fine, but others had skipping sections and distortion of the music (at one point their voices sounded robotically male )

I copied those CDs onto one of those "al Cheapo" CDs you buy in bulk. Another set (of completely different audio CDs) which I copied onto another bunch of cheap CDs, but from a different supplier, had no audible degradation of music quality.

Basically, were the problems I encountered due to poor CD quality, copy protection or bad copy technique?

I'm puzzled as to why the audio CDs would have an audible degradation of quality when I backup them onto those cheap CD-Rs, whilst I do not get any read errors when I use those same CDs to backup software and test them with a full install. Is audio data more susceptible to CD quality than your usual 'program' data?

Data cds have an extra level of errorcorrection/detection which might make up for the bad quality of the recorded cd. Audio cds don't have this.

Factors which might decrease the quality of the backup:

quality of source disk
quality of target disk
quality of reading source disk (that is: how good is your reader)
quality of writing target disk (that is: how good is your writer)
copy protections
copy techniques (not really important factor)

In your case first I would try a better cd-recordable.

try burning at a lower speed.... 4x max for audio cds and be sure that you have ripped the tracks properly (listen to them first before you burn them onto a cd... you may have not ripped them clean)

Lol, same answer as in your other post