Results:

Well, this project took over 15 days of work and the results make for a much shorter article than I had anticipated.  Here is the final result:

Every single file on the 100th generation disc was bit-for-bit the same as the Master disc!  I don't know about you, but I was very surprised by this result.  I expected that somewhere during the generations, there would be an error because of either CD-writer errors or bad media.  This doesn't mean that all CD-writers and media are perfect, but it goes to show how mature the technology has become.  I'm sure that if I went and made more generations of the original disc, eventually a bad copy would be created.

So some of you may be saying to yourself, "Well, duh, we all knew that you could make digital copies without any degradation".  I agree, we all probably believed that without proof.  But have you seen anybody test it before?  Now you have.

After doing all this testing, I am more understanding of how the movie and music industry feels about digital technology.  Obviously it is a tremendous danger to their profits.  They don't worry much about analog technology because 100 generations of a video tape or audio cassette tape would result in a completely useless image, but as we can see here, 100 generations of digital media has the potential to be perfect.

Well, now that this test is done, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with a stack of 100 already burned CD-R's.  Any ideas?

Brian

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