My old audio-cdr's are starting to sound like vinyl records

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You are of course correct here, but the longevity of Analog tape over DAT and CD's is actually longer. Yes degradation of information and will occur with analog, but at least with analog you don't have block data errors, and there are tapes over 50 years old that are still playable and transferable.

Even though digital is a younger medium, it is much more unstable medium for log term storage, at least with currently available technology. --Mastering houses will reject Digital media if it has more that one Block Error, but they still have no issues remastering and reissuing old analog material from the 30's onwards to the 1980's.

the problem is that nobody has yet invented a uniformly reliable archival medium/technology. i have a CD of an early [1950] recording of eileen barton where the master tape was barely there, hiss had overtaken most of the treble and there was about 10 seconds of severe treble signal loss that sounded like drop-outs but a bunch of 'em in sequence. but then again, i have a CD of a 1949 session with count basie that sounded [aside from mono] like it was recorded yesterday, with no audible drop-outs and absolutely no hiss. the 1955 recording of bill haley singing "rock around the clock" was recorded using an early ampex 30 inch-per-second deck, and it is the most pristine analog recording i've ever heard, with no hiss whatsoever and endless trebles. but i have some LPs from the late 50s [early stereo era] and there are audible drop-outs even back then! so i wonder what is behind the great variability in results?

Here's a bit more obvious and less complex explanation. Did you make/rip them from downloaded mp3 files? Back then people couldn't encode things as well as they could now, that and bitrates tended to be low, I remember 320k beng very rare.

Not audio, but I remember spending tons of time downloading a big giant .wmv video from an artist's website and 10 years later now digging up the old disc I burned it on, then watching the same video on youtube and the quality difference was amazing.

I mean it could be microartifacting and whatever, but I think this is a more likely and explainable explanation.

Vinyl is superior quality to CD. What you are experiencing is what can happen to vinyl as well- however far worse. CDs will eventually get CD rot and not be able to be read by the laser . You can always play a record disc, but you cant play a CD that has CD rot. You are hearing pixelation in sound. Also, my records sound clean and clear because I actually take care of them!

when I rip a "crackly" CD onto the hard drive and look at the waveform, I see lots of little but sharp drop-outs, or spikes.

Much of it has to do with the quality of the tape, the equipment it was duplicated on, was it a high speed dupe, etc. I have found many of the older acetate tapes to be in better condition then the newer mylar tapes dependent upon who made it and when. That doggone sticky shed syndrome is often the culprit. Plus I have had more trouble with 3M tapes then any! And I am speaking generally as I have both R2R and cassette mediums lying about. Early CDRs were mostly crap and had less longevity then magnetic media.

Thankfully most of my magnetic stuff is DBX encoded so I don't suffer from dropouts nearly as bad. They dynamic range compression and expansion brought up the sound above the noise floor of the tape if you will. They were light years ahead of Dolby! Dolby S was the only one that came close and I didn't care for that either.

Archival quality is the big bugaboo and always has been. ALL forms of recorded material will degrade and even if you copy it prior to that, you still lose a bit. Film photography is the same way! Still I will take an excellent analogue recording over digital ANY day of the week! Showing my age I suppose..

^This!! ! And if you want to get really blown away, play a dbx encoded record. Just be warned and don't turn up the volume too high as you start to play it. Otherwise it may leave brown stains upon your skivvies when the music kicks in.

my age is not too different. can you tell me what you didn't like about dolby S?

I didn't like how it seemed to make the mids rather muddy. I also went thru numerous decks due to failures. Tried to quote them but WP is NOT liking me today. Suffice to say that cap failures were also trashing the LSI dolby chips out. Add to the fact I have probably half a dozen cassette decks with dbx built in 3 of which are "Dragon Slayers" Plus the outboard 224 units I use on my R2R decks. I did give it a fair shot, just wasn't for me.

It should be noted that unlike a data CD's, audio CD's do not have the error correction that the data CD's have, This is one of the reasons why a data CD only has a 650MB capacity as opposed to the actual raw capacity of the CD which is 814MB. This 20% overhead on a data CD allows the data CD to withstand up to 20% corruption and still recover the data. Audio CDs just record the raw audio data strait onto the disk itself without any error correction, they can get away with this because the sample rate is 44.1 kHz which gives a nyquest bandwidth of about 22.5 kHz which puts it in the ultrasonic range because the human ear can't hear anything above 20 kHz. So as long as the errors remains scattered individually and isolated across the recording, their completely inaudible, but as soon as you get two or more errors that are adjacent to each other in a row that's when you start hearing noises in the recording.

hmmm come to think of it my memory of them at the time was that the mids seemed a bit thick or veiled but to me it was subtle. but it was notably quieter than dolby C.

Perhaps muddy is not a good term. The recordings seemed to be rather lifeless with dolby to me. Sure S did a heck of a job with noise, but also killed the sparkle of the material to me. Most noticeable on solo instruments like classical guitar, pianos, etc. And yes my decks were all properly aligned and maintained, I do most of it myself. But even for example if the alignment were somewhat off, you'd think it would play acceptably on the deck it was recorded on and to me it wasn't. And I confirmed much of this on my equipment. I was rather shocked to be honest. The Tascam was quite credible with NR off, but fell on it's face with Dolby S inline. When I substituted dbx for the dolby, the range and life of the recording came to life as corny as that sounds. That was when I was troubleshooting the Tascam. Then I did research and found out I wasn't the only one to experience this. The Sony decks were well crap I hate to say. Not the Sony of old not that I was ever a fan. They were one of the first to go downhill during the golden age...

It could be the speakers.

I have a set of speakers that produce terrible sound if you turn turn the volume on the speakers up too high and use the volume control in the computer to turn it down to a low volume.

If it is the CDs, remember that on CD-R the data is written to the top layer, not the bottom layer. If the top layer is damaged you are going to have trouble with them. That could be from scratches on them or from using markers not made for CDs that eat into the top surface layer.