I'm having a problem trying to burn sine wavs 17k and up. I generate the tones in Cool Edit Pro as .wav files (-1.4 db level), then burn to CD using Nero. When I play the CD it isn't right, frequencies around 17k have highly audible harmonic distortion, and anything higher than 17k has no sound. I tried playing the CD in several CD players including my computer. But when I open a track of the CD in Cool Edit Pro, it looks and sounds normal.

I am just trying to find out how high I can hear, I don't trust my computer's audio because there's no real sound card and I would like to test it in a CD player. This is troubling because if there is distortion around 17k hz, then obviously burned CDs are going to be less than great quality. My burner is a Yamaha. Any advice is appreciated.

This means that the tracks on the burned CD are perfectly OK - doesn't it?

Probably the reason is your equipment.

You might want to try an audio Player that resamples to 48kHz in a decent way like Winamp+SSRC output plugin or foobar2000.

Here's a test sample that gives you an impression of your equipment's high frequency fidelity. (Beware - can fry speakers - play back at low volume!)

Turns out the wav files sounded bad when I played them on the computer. I sort of found the problem but not totally - I changed the file resolution to 32 bit in Cool Edit (i have no idea what that means). The wav files sound normal now, but Nero won't burn them now! Sample rate is 44100.

What kind of player do you need for that test? I've never seen an .ape file before.

If you use high quality wave editors like CoolEditPro and want to burn audio CDs from the result you should safe the resulting files as 44.1kHz/16bit/stereo to avoid resampling/truncating by not-so-high-quality burning software. Besides that - see my 1st post.