This just ain't Apples week.

[Mike Anderson]

I thought when digitally compressed audio files were written to a CD that it decompressed the files, thus making them indistinguishable from a store bought CD.

Nope, not with MP3s or any other lossless format. Once it's compressed, the extra information is lost forever, and no amount of burning to a CD will get it back.

There is lossless compression however (e.g. FLAC), but you can only compress so much. A typical CD can be compressed by about 50%.

With FLAC you can always burn back to a CD, but there's no reason to (other than actually having to use a CD player) because FLAC is indistinguishable quality-wise from a CD.