CD-R's unplayable on some CD players?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dave H
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Dave H

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I mixdown from my Yamaha MD8 to computer WAV files & then burn the WAV files to CD using Adaptecs Easy CD Creator. After making many CD's I have found that some CD player won't play CD-R's while most do. I called Adaptec & they confirmed this for me, but could not tell me how to fix this or how to identify a CD player that won't play CD-Rs. Does anyone know about this? How are store-bought CD's different then CD-R's?

Dave
 
There's a difference not only in the quality of the media used on commercial CDs and most of the low end CD-Rs you'd buy at Walmart or wherever, but there's also a difference in the process of making the CD, including making a glass master that the CDs are manufactured from. There are places that will sell higher quality media, but without having a run of CDs manufactured, all home burned discs could potentially have a problem with certain CD players. Buying high quality CD-R will lessen the chance of this happening quite a bit though. If you are making CDs for distribution yourself at home, which I'm guessing most of us making CDs on this BBS either have done at some point or are going to in the future, there could be a loss of quality and life of the finished product. Not sonic quality, but media quality I mean.

Friend of mine had 50 discs burned by someone where he works in a machine that does 50 CDs in a batch type process, burning one after another until 50 copies are made. Half of those are now either completely bad, or they just don't play in certain computer CD-Rom drives. By the way, I hear of many computer CD drives not playing certain inexpensive media, especially laptop drives, and not as much about audio only CD players having problems.
 
I've found it's more a function of the player than the CDR brand you choose. But maybe it's both. Car CD decks, boombox CD players and cheapo high-speed CD-ROM drives are the most likely to fail to read CDR media. I conducted tests of a variety of media in several decks where I discovered a readability problem. In one deck- no CDRs could be read. In another, only brand-name CDRs could be read. In others only the gold ones failed. Since you're never going to have control of what deck the CDRs are going to be played in once you distribute them, why pay more for expensive media that might not work anyway? But overall- these experiments were all statistically insignificant since CDRs work in typical decks an overwhelming majority of the time. Most important to me is that the archive CDRs can be read in <my> machine(s).
 
I used to be really hung up on the quality of CD-R media, but these days, I find little difference. I buy 100 generic cd-r's for $120(Canadian).. no problems yet. I use to only use either.. Mitsui, or Kodak. Great media but to bloody expensive. As far as playing in other CD players etc. I've not run into this with any of the media I've used, generic or name brand. If it's CD-
RW then of course you can't play it anywhere, except in your cd-rw.

I don't have great quality cd players or anything, I've tried them on Sony, Technics, my car cd-rom which is pioneer i think. No problems.

I think DrStawl is right on in this. It's cheapo CD readers that cause the problems, how to overcome it, I don't know.

Emeric



[This message has been edited by Emeric (edited 08-27-1999).]
 
Thx to all replies. I have come to the conclusion that the cheap media is for me. I only have this problem on a very few CD players.

Thx .....Dave
 
The music CDs you buy in a store are pressed from a mold. CD-Rs are burned with a laser. They may look different (often green, gold, or blue instead of silver), they're less tolerant of extreme temperatures and sunlight, and they're more susceptible to physical damage. Whether CD-Rs or pressed CDs qualities differ is difficult to answer.But the obvious preventives are: after burning, the CDR should be put back in the Jewel case and protected like a jewel. Dont leave it in the Cd deck in your car, or scratch it, or put it through extreme temp. changes.It wont hold up like your normal CD's. K
I use an Adaptech SCSI with a Glyph/ Phillips CDR and CD Architect software to produce our masters @ redbook standard and have used HP,Sony,and Imation CDR's and only had one problem with a particular cdrom that wouldnt play but it was an old one, so knock on wood, weve been pretty successful.I agree that its probably the readers or CD miscare causing the problem.

Bill L&M

[This message has been edited by LMSTUDIO (edited 08-27-1999).]

[This message has been edited by LMSTUDIO (edited 08-27-1999).]

[This message has been edited by LMSTUDIO (edited 08-27-1999).]
 
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