"Professionally" burnt CDs

[RyanEmerson]

I've learned that even if you have a good master CD, burning it loses some quality. How do you get around this? I've that real CDs are burnt but "pressed" and I'm wondering if there's any way you could achieve this level of quality without getting expensive?

Also, what's a good company (and a link if you could) that will replicate your CD, package them in jewl cases, shrink-wrapped, and with inserts, too?

[PersonalJesus]

You can probably go to a bookstore and find a book on mastering, look through it and it should have all those questions answered by a professional.

From what I gather, if you have a master CD, then you can take it to a replication company and get it pressed. Seriously though, no one in the general population will ever notice the difference between a pressed CD and a CD-R, so unless you plan on making and distributing 1000+ coppies (about $1000-$2000) your better off just getting a fast 52x CD writer and buring them yourself.

Just try it for yourself. Burn a copy of a CD and have a friend switch out the two without your knowing which is which. You wont be able to hear a difference.

[lpdeluxe]

"Real" manufactured CDs are produced by molding pits into the plastic substrate (under the clear plastic layer). The laser reads the pits as having different reflectivity from the surrounding flat parts and that's what it interprets as music or data or whatever. CDRs and CDRWs are made with layers of dye that, when zapped by a properly adjusted laser, mimic the reflectivity of the pits. The problem is that the dye layers are not stable, and this leads to unreadable CDRs. I have seen some that looked like oil slicks, and were unplayable. There is no cure for this condition. A study was done last year and Mitsui was found to be the longest lasting CDR brand...but there are no guarantees. You have to be careful to avoid exposure to sunlight and heat. I ALWAYS put CDRs in jewel cases with black backs, even when giving a band a dub of a couple of songs to take home. Otherwise they can deteriorate pretty fast. So the difference between a manufactured CD and a CDR is that the manufactured one is not "burnt": its digital pattern is a physical spiral of pits and it will outlast a CDR by probably about a million to one! I have 4-year-old CDRs that are unreadable, which led me to do some research....If you want to archive, CDRs ain't the way to go.

Note that this is completely apart from the issue of sound. A CDR will sound exactly like a manufactured CD, as long as you have the skill to make your recording that good......

[distortedrumble]

i have 4 year old cdrs that are readable....i have some i burned yesterday that arent lol.......it really is pot luck. so be kind to the consumer....dont try to sell your stuff off as 10 bucks if you burnt it at home....

[Richard Monroe]

I beg to differ. I have a perfectly good high speed personal CD-R duplicator, and every person who has listened to the CD-R copies of the Red Book Master of my album has commented on how much better the pressed finished product sounds. Anyone can hear the difference. Check out ADA (Artist Development Associates) in Framingham, Massachusetts. They did a great job on my album "Reunion".-Richie

[Massive Master]

Speaking of disc quality...

If you've got a manufactured disc that sounds better than the PMCD, there was something wrong with the PMCD.

Everyone go out right now and get a Plextor PlexWriter Premium drive.

They're under $100 at NewEgg.com and worth five times the price.

The error-checking software alone is worth five times the price for that matter...

Give a client a disc with one lonely C2 error on it and find yourself in small-claims court.

Read more at my site - under FAQ's -> DISC ERRORS

John Scrip - www.massivemastering.com

[Richard Monroe]

Just to clarify, the commercially produced copies don't sound better than the PMCD, They sound better than CDR copies of the PMCD.-Richie

[ds21]

Originally posted by Massive Master
Speaking of disc quality...

If you've got a manufactured disc that sounds better than the PMCD, there was something wrong with the PMCD.

Everyone go out right now and get a Plextor PlexWriter Premium drive.

They're under $100 at NewEgg.com and worth five times the price.

The error-checking software alone is worth five times the price for that matter...

Give a client a disc with one lonely C2 error on it and find yourself in small-claims court.

Read more at my site - under FAQ's -> DISC ERRORS

John Scrip - www.massivemastering.com

I Like the Yamaha F1 CDR for that exact same reason, with the "Mastering mode" it will reduce errors, jitter, and compatability issues.

[Aaron Cheney]

Another issue that nobody's brought up that I've found is that burned CD's contain extra info in the header that many CD players can't read. What ends up happening is that the first second or so of the first song gets cut off.
If you have your CD pro duped that never happens.

A
www.aaroncheney.com

[vestast]

Originally posted by ds21
I Like the Yamaha F1 CDR for that exact same reason, with the "Mastering mode" it will reduce errors, jitter, and compatability issues.

I was just looking at the Yamaha F1 which seems interesting. One question though. It looks like it comes with a special version of Nero to utilize the special features on the unit. But if your using Nero, then your CD's are not being burnt as Redbook CD's, are they ?

[Massive Master]

Originally posted by Aaron Cheney
Another issue that nobody's brought up that I've found is that burned CD's contain extra info in the header that many CD players can't read. What ends up happening is that the first second or so of the first song gets cut off.
If you have your CD pro duped that never happens.

That's actually a side-effect of consumer (non-redbook) burning - If you had that duped, you'd have the same problem with the dupes.

It can also come from poor PQ editing, as many CD players have ramp of up to 50ms at the head frame of every track.

JS -

[TexRoadkill]

Originally Posted by Richard Monroe

I beg to differ. I have a perfectly good high speed personal CD-R duplicator, and every person who has listened to the CD-R copies of the Red Book Master of my album has commented on how much better the pressed finished product sounds. Anyone can hear the difference.

That doesn't really make sense. A CD is simply a digital storage medium. It can't impart any type of character to the sound. Saying one type of CD sounds different is like saying one type of hard drive sounds different or that one brand of flash media sounds better then another.

A CD can only contain a perfect copy or have errors.

[Richard Monroe]

My point exactly, Tex. It is my assumption that the CD-R replicator introduces a very low level of transcription error, not unlike errors in DNA replication. It's not enough to cause outright skipping, as a rule, but if the laser lens gets dirty, it will skip. I'm guessing that the quality of the laser and the laser lens affects transcription, introducing small errors long before they become frequent enough to make the CD unreadable. If the data transmission was always 100% accurate, we wouldn't have to clean the lens at all.-Richie

[faderbug]

until it gets so dirty it can't read the (correct) data anymore?

[jacen]

Does burning at slower speeds (eg. 4x instead of 52x) produce better CDs?

[Richard Monroe]

Yes, that's why red book masters are burned at low speeds. If it was really just a matter of X's and O's, and there were no copying errors, it wouldn't matter. But it does matter, and good copiers make better copies than bad ones.-Richie

[Massive Master]

I think that's one of those things that people forget - With a CD, you're not reading traditional magnetic data - The pits and lands on a cd are physical "bumps" in the dye. Speed can have a huge effect on how accurately those bumps are made. Certain discs also write better at certain speeds.

In my own tests, on a maximum-quality drive (such as a Plextor Premium) BLER increases sharply after 8X and BELOW 2X.

Needless to say, I burn my PMCD's at 4X, where I find the lowest BLER of any speed.

Gee, you know, no one ever answered the original question here...

Try www.diskfaktory.com - They do the best short-run work I've ever seen at the best prices I've ever seen. Although they seem to be painfully slow. I suppose that keeps with the "Triangle" system of FAST/CHEAP/GOOD (you can usually have two, but never all three).

[freshmattyp]

I would recommend National Media Services for short run. I've sent them 4 projects, turnaround is always less than a week, and I've never had a bad disk.

www.natlcass.com

[NL5]

Hey guys,

Where is a good place for short run replication (non-burned cd's)?


Thanks,

NL5

[Massive Master]

Short runs are almost always CD-R's.

Lemme put it to you this way, one place I deal with will give you 1 standard (aluminum/lacquer/plastic) CD for $699. For an extra dollar, they'll give you 999 more. It costs so much to make that first disc - The clean room, the glass master, stampers, blah, blah, blah, that it's not worth doing less than a run of at least 1000 pieces.

For short-run CD-R's, try www.diskfaktory.com - They rock.