Worthwhile CD-R Media? 41
isdnip asks: "I've noticed that when I burn a CD-R, it's basically a random chance whether or not it will play on any given CD player or CD-ROM drive. Blank CD-Rs are dirt cheap nowadays, but the costlier gold ones are not available at retail, if at all. So which ones now on the market are most likely to work? They seem more interested in bragging about maximum speed, not quality. Does a high speed rating help or hurt readability (I usually only burn at 2x or 4x)?"
"Just for example, I've had pretty good luck with Maxell 'CD-R pro' blanks, mediocre luck with 'IBM' licensed-brand media, and even worse results from Memorex, which had the dubious distinction of looking most like real gold, though really just based on an ordinary dye layer. I don't want to buy a 50-pack of junk. I haven't seen any magazine reviews, either. I'm sure Slashdot readers have had a wealth of experience which we could all stand to share."
Dan's Data Article (Score:5, Informative)
At first, it focuses mostly on strangely colored and oddly shaped cdrs, but at the bottom it has some VERY useful information, including a little utility called cdrid [www.gum.de], which identifies WHO REALLY makes the cdr disk. It turns out many differently branded disks are actually made by the same company.
The article also points out that cdrs with a darker dye in them work better. I tend to agree from experience. Typically, I buy Sony CDRS from staples... they're pretty cheap and work good. I also found that the sony ones work fine in most car cd players, while cheap ones don't work at all.
(By the way.... a Plextor 24x burner is only about $150 now... i find that burning cds at lower speeds doesn't improve compatibility, execpt for with cheap disks; but my burner only works up to 8x, so i dont know how faster ones fare). But beware: make sure your drive supports BuRN proof or something similar. There is nothing more aggrivating then having to burn a cd twice because of a buffer underrun.
Mitsui, Kodak Gold Respected Among Music Traders (Score:3, Informative)
You typically can't find good quality CD-Rs at the major computer stores and you definitely won't get good prices on them. They don't have the lowest prices out there, but I've been pretty happy ordering 100 lots of 80 min Mitsui unbranded silvers from american digital [american-digital.com] and haven't burned a coaster or had a CD-R go bad yet. Hunt around and I'm sure you can find some better deals online.
... rjs
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Drive heads, speed, media and more (Score:4, Informative)
As such, the drive which can't read it probably has a wider beam and/or a less sensitive pickup.
But if you put that same disk back in a CDRW drive (like the one which wrote it) you'll find that it reads just fine. (Kind of like a floppy drive being out of alignment, only in this case the "alignment" is a matter of quality of beam reflection rather than magnetic field).
To move on...
Media is, as mentioned elsewhere, only made by a couple of manufacturers, BUT they also make a number of different levels of quality which are then sold and branded by anybody/everybody.
So how do you tell? Most cd-burning software nowadays will tell you what the media is, but that doesn't help much in the store. (Er, excuse me, can I burn one of these just as a test? Yeah, I'll tape the box back up nice and neat if they suck...)
So you have to judge by color. Unfortunately many of the top-side decals/coatings used in the branding process have a color of their own (hence light-green phthalocyanine dye often appearing blue or dark-green).
In general, a CDRW will give MUCH better cross-drive compatibility than a simple CDR due to the higher sensitivity of the dyes and the better quality reflective surface behind.
Which brings me to cheap CD's. Real CD's have an aluminum surface sandwiched between two plastic disks. A CDR actually needs an extra set of layers because the dye isn't reflective! It has a silver backing which is laid on top of the second layer of plastic. Now a few people will disagree and say it's on the same layer as the dye which is sometimes true, but most of the manufacturers have switched to having it be on the other side (outside) of the plastic sandwich as it makes for a much lower level of defects. But this means that you really have to have the final decal with the cutesy branding/artwork/whatever to protect the silver!
Super cheap (blank silver) CD's will very often scratch very easily on the top surface. I've even seen a few that you could smear the silver off with a firm rub of your finger tip.
Evil...
Bad...
Stay away...
So cheap is fine s'long as they're CDRW's (or at least the darker CDR's) and they have a top decal (or 3rd layer of real plastic for the fancy-schmancy folks).
Finally, burn slower! Cut 20% off your drive's rated speed (or the CDR's rated speed if it's slower) and you'll get much better burns. Manufacturers of drives and media alike advertise the best possible numbers they can get away with. If your drive's beam is a little under-powered and the dye on that batch of CD's is a little thin, then a reduction in speed will make for a lot fewer toasters, er, coasters.
(I've been playing with OSX too much, I can tell!)
Enjoy!
Quality of hardware (Score:3, Informative)
Three years ago, I picked up an 8x Plextor burner, and decided to run some tests in order to determine what kind of (then expensive) blanks I should be using.
I ordered 2 each of ~12 different makes of CD-R blank -- as many as I could find at one place at one time -- and tried them all. As burning at 8x was the latest-and-greatest thing at the time, none of the discs were "rated" for the speed except for a special, higher-dollar one from Kodak.
After burning identical audio tracks at 8x to half of the discs, I listened to them with a well-calibrated ear on a good mid-fi stereo.
They all worked fine. No ticking, no artificial harshness, nadda. The twelve of them sounded exactly the same.
This was frustrating, because I still had no idea what brand to buy - so I downgraded the CD player from a Carver TL-3300 to a friend's borrowed (and quite abused and tired) Playstation.
Some variations finally showed. Surprisingly, the 8x-rated Kodak disc worked least well - slow seek times, and strange behavior. I don't remember the rest of it that battery, unfortunately.
The next test involved ripping the CDs with cdparanoia, and timing how long it took for a good rip, on a 32x Plextor reader. All discs ripped without reported error, which was good - the Kodak was slowest of the bunch, and TDK the fastest.
Interestingly, the burner came packaged with a TDK blank as a gimme.
But what makes this interesting is that some of the discs were not rated for speeds anywhere near 8x - IIRC, the Maxell blanks said 2x on the package. They all passed. Even the Kodak, though strange in some way, was acceptable (and guaranteed to be readable for 100 years or somesuch).
Since then, I've not done anything as exhaustive. But I have had 74-minute Verbatim discs fail to read -at all- in any Playstation, while the box of 50 80-minute Verbatims (with, appearently, the same dark blue dye formulation) work well with everything.
At the studio, I use the cheapest, no-name unbranded shiney CDs I can get, with an identical Plextor burner. I've never had any customers say anything to me about an unreadable burn, and I never burn at 4x, 2x, or 1x - why waste the time?
Meanwhile, my sister has a 4x Phillips CD-RW, which always produces skip-prone CDs, that occasioally tick and pop - no matter what media is used.
To conclude the sermon, I'd like to point out that Plextor makes the most expensive burners available to consumers, and that by most (if not all) accounts, they're worth every cent. For a more lengthy and detailed analysis, on more modern hardware, see: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/cdrwtestidep12
Further, so long as I'm ranting, the color of the
dye means absolutely nothing, except to visually compare two or more CDs. Even if CD players used some binary reflective/nonreflective technique to read a disc, which they do not, they use infrared light to do their business. Which is to say that unless you're wearing IR goggles, you have no idea what the dye looks like to a CD player.
All that happens (or, rather, needs to happen) when a CD is burned is that it makes a longer path for the light of the reading laser wherever a pit should be, by putting a hole in the dye layer below the reflective metal (which, FYI, was 24k gold on the Kodak disc, and silver (not aluminum) on the TDK).
You might've noticed that mass-produced, stamped
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Any old thing does for me. (Score:2, Informative)
My friend did comment that an audio cd I did for him sounded 'colder' than the original disk, to which i snorted at and informed him that that was impossible as it was a bit-for-bit copy, but I read somewhere that different quality cdr can indeed sound different, but as I'm no audiophile (regularly listen to mp3 through headphones without wincing) it doesn't bother me.