CD-A Burn...E-IDE (ATAPI) or USB?

[mark4man]

Folks,

Having finally found an external Plextor Premium-U, which will be used to burn pre-master audio CD's to be sent to the replication house for mass production...

...I understand that most CD-RW's are mfg.'d as E-IDE; & if packaged as external by the mfg., a Bridge Chip is used to adapt the interface (ATA-2 > USB.)

So, my question is:

Am I going to get as accurate a burn utilizing USB, as I would from an internal drive hooked up to the IDE ribbon cable in the tower?

Is the data that's transferred identical...or is it converted somehow?

(don't care about speed...only accuracy)

Thanks,

mark4man

 

[Massive Master]

It'll be fine.

 

[mark4man]

John,

Thanks.

I wound up with the internal Premium (the internet resellers I thought I had lined up turned out to be BSr's...out of stock but still reporting availability.) (I-ei-ei-ei-i.)

Very happy, tho...installed without a hitch...beginning to get my feet wet with PlexTools...

But check this out:

JFTHOI, tonite I burned two compositions to a blank Verbatim CD-R (which came with the drive)...class material, right?...Verbatim!

Then I broke out a TDK blank from a bulk tub I grabbed at CompUSA; & burned the same two tunes.

The C1 (BLER) error rate on the Verbatim disc was (for about 8 minutes worth of digital audio)...2980.

But for the same material on the cheapo TDK disc...there were only 161 C1 errors !!!

I'll have to look into this further tomorrow, but the only thing I did differently on the TDK burn was to select 1X as the write speed in WaveLab. Of course the PlexWriter burned at it's default minimum...4X...but, on this WaveLab setting...it was a perfect 4X (690 KB/s.) On the Verbatim, I had chose 4X in WaveLab; & the disc burned at 691 (+ change) KB/s.

Don't know if that would make a difference, tho.

Weird.

Later,

mark4man

 

[Massive Master]

The perfect example of why EVERY potential production master should be checked.

Last month, I went through a stack of 100 Tayio Yuden discs (my personal favorite) and about every 3rd disc had C2's on it. My "spares" (same brand, different lot number) were all fine - Low rates, no C2's, etc.

TY made a bad batch. Nobody's perfect, right?

 

[mark4man]

John,

My error...sorry...

...the Verbatim media was "DataLife Plus"; & not their audio media ("Vibe Music".)

But, yeah...you're right...check everything first.

(& now, of course, I'm going to have to look into the physical & technical differences between standard CD-R media & that mfg.'d specifically for digital audio.)

It's a real relief, tho, to know that I'm going to get a good result from the new Plextor drive. I checked a couple of my classic stamped discs...& they contained C1's up into the 5 & 6 thousand range. I couldn't believe it...pressed by major record companies !!!

mark4man