Professional CD-R and DVD-R Burners/Duplicators?

burnWell asks: "I work for a software publisher, and when preparing CD media for final distribution to the manufacturer (the Gold Master if you will), we often find that our CD and DVD burns are not very good quality. Are there any recommendations for professional grade, highest quality CD-R and DVD-R writers? Are there any tools or metrics we should use to verify how 'good' a particular burn happens to be, and to that end, how well behaved some brands of media are versus another? Are there recommendations for the very highest quality CD-R and DVD-R duplicators?"

ISO?

[billh]

If you must use a CDR, find a few different kinds of media, burn slow, and compare. But have you considered just delivering the original as an ISO?

Delivering a disc?!?

[GoRK]

Publishers will almost always take the data in a different format (iso) or on tape. Why do you assume that just because you are giving them the data on CD they are copying all the bit errors on the disc? They probably just stick it in a drive and read the data track with error correction (and make test disc or two to be sure) before feeding it to the presses for mass production.

Please, one call to your publisher would have had this explained to you.

Re:ISO?

[ComputerSlicer23]

I've got to agree with this guy. Deliver the ISO (possibly on CD ironically), with an MD5SUM of the file.

The gold master only needs to be good enough to read it once.

I burn ISO's of linux distros all the time, with the CD's I pickup using a Sony CD burner. In all that time, I think I've had a half dozen coasters. Generally your biggest problem, is the CD you are reading it on is crappy (not the burner). A lot of laptops or slimline CD's that go into 1U server or speciality small machines have a very low tolerance for error and are very sensitive to reading burned CD's. Just like CD's from pre-burner days have trouble with CDR's, and lots of trouble with CDRW's.

If you are burning them yourself, this makes sense, go get a high quality CD duplicator (stand alone machines that take spools of CD's). Use a name brand (Memorex I've had good luck with, Verbatim's I tend to stay away from if I'm paying attention, but that's an old, old bias, pickup a name brand and generally you'll be fine). If not, go pay someone with the proper tools to do it. Ten years ago, it was $1000 for the master, a buck a disk when I was looking to get CD's made when a burner was about $4K for the drive, and $20 for a blank CD. I'd guess the stamped price has stayed roughly the same, maybe gone up a little in price.

Kirby

Re:Two words: Taiyo Yuden

[alienw]

The 8 defects/sector discs are indeed made in Taiwan by CMC (or someone else -- the media code only tells you who made the master and doesn't identify a specific manufacturer reliably). The Mitsubishi discs are still not as good as Taiyo Yuden, they are about 1 defect/sector (but obviously an order of magnitude better than CMC). I heard various bad things about the Mitsubishi technology (AZO) and it does indeed seem inferior to phtalocyanine (what most other manufacturers use).

What's surprising is that price is not an indicator. The Taiyo Yuden music discs are sold under the Maxell brand for less than CMC discs (about half the Maxell spindles in the store were made in Japan, the others were made in Taiwan). Really, the only way to tell good discs from bad ones is to check the country of manufacture.