Best CDR for burning a Master to send to duplicators

In my experience Andy, most older CD players that will write at 1x will be fine. The newer ones that write faster, literally handle audio better than the older ones. I can do burns here at 52x. I do them all the time for myself and believe it or not, have never experienced any errors, clicks, pops or artifacts. That said, I'd never burn that fast for a client or anything that was to be sent to a duplication facility. You want to definitely have a player that writes at 1x for something serious though just to be safe. With most players out there today, you can even get away with 2x or 4x. I'd never go any higher than 4x though.

It is also a good idea to send a data disc of the project as a safety net. When I master for clients, a data disc is always supplied with pq sheets as well so that if there IS an issue with the audio cd, they can use the data cd to get the same results and have all the cue points and times they need to calibrate their machines. Hope this helps, good luck.

The guys over in Gearslutz mastering forum speak in detail about CD drives and error checking Audio CDs.

You may want to visit over there.

best regards,
mike

and who know how the ripping process will go when they try it

You can verify them yourself, if your rips are bit perfect replicas of the original file(s) then they are most likely fine.

If you've already made and verified a good CD for duplication why would you then revert back to using the file(s) you've just burned?  The only reason to do that would be if you had more faith in the gear and personnel at the duplication facility.  Personally I'd have more faith in my own loving care than that of some faceless operator.

I'm with Danny here, you can get over fussy when most of the time you're burning all day long without a glitch.  It is sods law though as it will invariably be the important one for a client or the one you send to have duplicated that will be the exception to the rule whatever you do to mitigate the problems.

And this is the fail-safe to counter that.

It is also a good idea to send a data disc of the project as a safety net. When I master for clients, a data disc is always supplied with pq sheets as well so that if there IS an issue with the audio cd, they can use the data cd to get the same results and have all the cue points and times they need to calibrate their machines.

As for there being some magic quality media out there that excels over the rest, I've never found it yet.  Whatever suits your burner is a good way to go and most burner manufacturers have published lists of their preferences for media.

It's not like tape where certain characteristics will influence the quality of the product, the media you choose will either work 100% or it will be useless.

For a while in the 90's I worked in the Oral Histroy deparment of the National Library of Australia which is situated in Canberra. They have over 30,000 hours of material going back many years. They are transferring it all slowly over to digital.

They have an underground bunker which will keep going long after the world is destroyed. Out of interest everything is also transferred over to a special reel to reel tape that BASF made for them that lasts 150 years as well as CD. People are still going in there every day and recording all our curent history speaking it all into a mike. They are editing it all about 10 minutes later in another studio and it is being burned before the recording session is over. A session might last 3 hours and they are already buring the first CD about 30 minutes after the interview starts. Its very cool to watch. So they are not only trying to catch up on all the stuff that dates back to the very first crude tape machines but they are doing the current stuff too. There is a whole team pf people in there doing it. I used to get into trouble because I used to listen to all the stuff while I was testing for errors. I was not supposed to. Some of those stories are unbelievable that people have told. I cried many times. Some of the recordings are very bad and they have the very best noise reduction software for pulling out backgrounds that were over loud. Some of that was incredible to do too. We could expose conversations that were inaudible because of the background noise. But most often oral historians used to do the recordings even many years ago in the quietest of rooms. I was also amazaed at how good some of them sounded. They are aiming to get it all on line in the end and that will be amazing too. Anyone will be able to listen to it.

They have the highest standards of audio transfer and CD burning. I was in an area where we tested blank media and also CD burners for best performance and error rates. Firstly the machine that tests the error rates is a serious, very expensive and very special CD player that Sony built for the library connected to a dedicated PC running some pretty clever software. You would be amazed at the error rates of stanadard music CD's. You should have seen the drive mechanism for this special player. Nothing like you would ever see in a standard commercial drive. It was probably worth $10, 000 or more. It was large too.

We tested blank media fairly hard. The best CD's in the world are a special version of Gold that Mitsui made just for the Nat Lib. But the Mitsui gold that is available is also pretty good.

We would test error rates just after a burn and then we would expose the CD's to light and UV rays as powerful as many suns for 20 days straight. Verbatum and many other brands came out without any dye left ie see right through. Mitsui came out perfect still had only a minor error rate shift after the sun test and all the audio was intact.

They only allow a XI burn at the Nat Lib. They do NOT even allow a burn at X2. The error rates go up, you have got no idea! Can't remember what burners they had then but I am pretty sure they are on the best HHB's now. HHB might even build a special burner just for them too. The CD's are meant to last over 100 years too. The room is 18 degrees C and 20 % humidity. An alarm goes off after you have been in there for a minute. We used to go in there on very hot days and get into trouble for doing it!

You don't have to supply music as files to a duplicator. They most often like an audio CD. If you use great media and do a burn at 2X or 4X Max (as Danny correctly points out) you will have no problems. The error rates are pretty low even at 4X. Don't send your album out on a 50 or 20 cent CD. Not good. Your blank should be $4 to $5 each. Master grade blanks are available most often from the CD duplicators themselves.

If you want to know how many errors we are actually talking about I cannot remember exactly. I could maybe call up some of my friends in there and get some figures again. I think 200 to 400 might be typical for a standard music CD but they were aiming for like 5 or 10 on the whole CD!

One thing I REALLY learned in there is to blow the CD with some canned pure air just prior to burning. If you take a blank CD out and have a good look under a strong light you will see hundreds (or tens) of tiny dust particles. (there will always be some!) One dust particle deflects the laser and causes heaps of errors. One short puff of air and all them will go, have a close look again at the CD before inserting, you will be amazed. Clean totally. This is one of the biggest causes of errors. (As well as poor quality media) Many people do not clean their blanks first. It is vital. If you dont, the dust particles end up being flicked off and they build up inside the burner as well which is also no good. The burners are in special purified air rooms at the Lib! They go to extremes there!

Also some duplicators don't like any signals hitting 0 db FS either. If you limit everything to -1db you will always be safe and they will never complain.

Interesting about the Oral History, Jeff. Future archeologists may conclude that Australia must have once been the center of civilization, as we often assume about the ancient Egyptians, because it will be the only remaining source of documentation after the Romulans have destroyed us.

mike_mccue


Over at Gearslutz in the mastering section there are ongoing discussions about which current CD burners burn with less errors and which software is currently available to check for errors. The Reed Solomon error correction stuff is great except it makes it difficult to check your CD master for actual errors.

You need an app that can somehow bypass the error correction.

The Mastering houses make a practice of checking for errors before replicating your disc.

If you want to stay abreast of how you can do so yourself the folks at Gearslutz mastering forum are usually up to date on which error checking apps are working with the latest OS and drives available.

best regards,
mike

As I thought.

Nobody on there has a definitive answer either.

I use a £12 Samsung DVD/RW burner which compares on error rates to the vaunted Plextor models.  On a damaged disk it showed error rates of 0.027 at 28X read compared to the Plextor showing 0.023 at 3x.

The Sony industrial units were good when there wasn't anything else around but I'd bet the technology in the newer domestic drives perform better WRT C1 and C2 errors these days.  That's pretty much all the that a duplication plant is going to use for checking anyway.

Jeff with due respect I think what you are saying there was probably true many moons ago but I don't think the same applies these days and it appears that many respected manufacturers are now using badge engineered mechs from other manufacturers i.e. LiteOn, Samsung et. al.

The implication that domestic drives are as bad as you are implying I doubt very much too.  No mass market manufacturer can well afford a product recall of the size they would be facing if their drives were as bad as you state for showing up errors, and Sony certainly went through a bad patch for defective drives.  Most domestic drives fail mechanically out of warranty, often with alignment issues and often in the case of through dust and smoke being drawn in by the computer fans (on internal drives) causing focus issues.  It is the most likely component on a PC to fail, along with perhaps hard drives, basically because it is primarily a mechanical device.

And your explanation of media is flawed too, like I said earlier it is probably a better way to go to use the media recommended by your CD writers manufacturer as they are designed to perform best with a particular media.  So whether you can see through a Verbatim or you have a mirror finish on your obviously preferred Mitsui brand is meaningless.

For that reason it may be well to ask the duplicator what media they prefer.

As for knowing whether price relates to quality is baloney too.

I know full well I can usually produce a CD that will pass any tests for duplicating at the first attempt on a £12 drive on media readily available from the supermarket and likely at 52X full-speed too. 

I wouldn't recommend that as a way to go but then I wouldn't suggest the other extreme of digging a big hole in the ground, turning it into a controlled enviroment, buying a magic Mitsui gold disk and using a vintage Sony industrial burner at $10,000 to burn it either.

Sanity lies somewhere between the fart-skinning and being careless.

 

 

So nothing to do with the original topic of the thread then?

Here's what I know definitively, I have a something-brand-name litescribe burner in my DAW and it burns at minimum 16x speed... if I burn a disk on a bulk disc I buy at Best Buy and then leave the disk on my car seat in the Florida sunshine for a few days the disc begins to produce audible errors... not the minuscule errors that Reed Solomom corrects but rather audible clicks and pops.

This is on discs that have no signal above -1dBFS.

I think the reason that there is no definitive answer is because Vendors are always changing their offerings. I know that Plextor was considered reliable and then had to find a new supplier and suddenly the new stuff wasn't as reliable.

Furthermore I don't think there are many apps that can measure the errors accurately because they have to communicate with the CD burners at a, for lack of a better word, firmware level.

I've always relied on the replicators and their fancy dedicated machines.


In the midst of all the stuff discussed at gear slutz you may find topical conversations that suggest very inexpensive burners that also can run the test software.

In the absence of that you can just choose to trust that time has healed all issues and that all the stuff works great now.

I know that there is something less than ideal with my "dailys" CD burner and disk choice.


The next time it's really important to me I'll probably stop over at gear slutz to see what is the best flavor of the week.


best regards,
mike

I buy a 50 pack of Tayo Yudens every now and then and they seem to hold up well in my mini van as work in progress discs. I have some that were burned years ago that seem fine.

I really wish I knew more about this stuff but it's not a big issue for me at the moment.

I would enjoy learning of some error checking software that worked with some inexpensive burner or player.



all the best,
mike

Thanks!

I'm off to work for CMT at spring break down on the beach.

I may or may not come back! ;-)

I'll look at the link later.


all the best,
mike

I avoid budget discs and stick with Taiyo Yuden--but at 3 cents each, they're budget enough. I don't recall ever having a problem with them except for the occasional bad burn out of hundreds.  And the bad burn was an obvious 'verify failed' type error.

If you really want to find out what's going on with respect to error rates and such, get a lite-on burner and K-Probe software.

I recently sent out a set of 12 CD masters (not 12 copies, but 12 separate masters) that I burned at 24x on Taiyo Yuden inkjet printable discs. I printed labels on them. They were accepted with no problems. When I got the check discs back, they were fine. I ripped them and bit-compared them with the originals and they were exact.

I'm planning to go with the Taiyo Yuden discs and see how that goes.

These seem to be the most widely respected in the current climate.

That's why it's good that threads like this come up from time to time.  Well it keeps me on my toes as to what is currently out there at least.

So thanks for bringing it up and good luck with the CD.