Best Brands of CDR-Audio disks?

[BobO]

I'm fairly new to home recording...recently bought a Boss BR-8 and am using a Philips CDR775 to master. Does anyone have an opinion on the best quality blank disks (audio), or are they all pretty much the same? I've tried a few different brands and can't really tell the difference in sound quality, although some occassionally don't play on my portable "discman."

Any opinions would be appreciated...thanks.

[Jon X]

If you are buying bulk spools, look at them from the side if you can, to see what the color is. Ones that have a green tint are usually lower quality. Silver or blue are normally better. I buy Sony discs for burning things that I really care about, and whatever I can find that's cheaper but still decent for everything else. Usually Imation for the latter. The main problems I've had with bad discs are failure to play in all CD players as you mentioned, failure to burn reliably, and just failing outright where they can't be read anymore by even the CD-R after a while. Rarely have I noticed a difference in sound quality unless I used a really cheap blank.

Check with the manufacturer of your CD-R and see what discs they recommend. I've had different disc brands fail based on what burner I was using.

[Cooperman]

I use TDK discs with a Yamaha 8x4x24 burner and can proudly say have NEVER burnt a dud disc. I didn't know about the colour thing that JonX mentioned but the TDK ones are blue so that probably means I'm onto a good thing.

[BobO]

Thanks for the replies. I've also found the TDKs to be the most reliable ones thus far. I'll also take a look at the color on any spools I buy. The only spool I've purchased so far was the Memorex brand, and I've had trouble with them.

[RWhite]

For my 2 bits, let me say that in my day job I work at a Telecom company in the IT department. We burn tons of CDR data discs, and have at various times used TDK, Maxcell, Verbatim, and Ricoh. Although they have all been pretty reliable I would say that TDK have had the least defects. So thats what I have been using for my home audio CDs.

I would also add that at my job we work our burners pretty hard, and they all gradually die after about a year (just after the warranties expire of course). Once they start going out of alignment it doesn't matter what brand you use, they will all slag. So if you start getting a lot of write errors look at the burner first and the CDR brand second.