For audio CD burning, the slower the speed the better! Only a few years ago, CD players wouldn't even play CD-R's with music 'unless' they were burnt at single speed. But things have improved since then. But all the same, it's not the 1st time I've heard of burning at highest speed with today's burners & nothing appears to be on disk whfen it's played (more noticeable with VCD's). As murasame said, try another at a lower speed before we come to any conclusions.

Okay. I'll try another. From what I've gathered from you 2, the cd's are ruined if they've been burned incorrectly? So I can just toss the first try cd?
thx

If a CD has been burnt too fast for the media to cope & it won't play on your normal CD player at home or car, generally your computer is the only place it will play (some exceptions for devices like 'some' portables & dvd players.) Try it in both your car & home stereo before tossing it out. I did suggest you might sacrifice 1/so until we know what the problem is. If it doesn't work next time at a slow speed, then both murasame & I are agreed it's a computer set-up/config. issue.

Guess what!?
I put the cd I burned yesterday in my pc (was going to try to burn on it again) and the winamp program popped up and started playing the songs. Of course they sounded horrid and distorted on my pc, but---took it straight out to the car and it worked perfectly and sounds pretty good too.
I have no idea what happened. It was healed. lol.
Anyways, been burnin' 'em up. I've burned two more at 32x. I'll burn more at slower speeds to see if that improves them more.
I'm still contacting the dude that built my pc though. I assume it shouldn't be sounding this crappy. My old pc didn't, for sure.
Thank you all for your help and patience. Will let you know what the problem is with my pc, so you can help future newbies.
Thanks so much!

I'm also old school. I always burn audio & vcd at the minimum speeds possible on the particular burner I'm using. But make available a porche with a capability of 250mph in 20 or so secs & how many people will want to hold back. It's marketing, they say it will burn at 50 or so speed so that's what everybody wants to do. Despite it's pushing both the burner & the media to their limits. Graphics (which includes both audio & video) are the most difficult of all medias to burn to CD (i.e.: it is the most easily corrupted b/c of its complexity & difficulty for a cd burner to read & write simultaneously.) Multiply this by 50 times & you might have a problem, it's fine for text files & stuff though.

Fantastic, yes I agree. It's definitely something with your setup. I was slow to post my last post b/c I did some weight loss exercises so-to-speak in-b/w starting & finishing the post so you beat me. But I'm wrapped to hear your cd's work fine! Take my much earlier advice, there's no way you should pay for services not rendered properly! But then I'm sorry to hear you have a problem with your config.
Please excuse my total ignorance with net language, but what does lol stand for?

lol mean laugh out loud. tx means thanks, so TX alot! again.
Will let you all know about the config prob.