Topic: CD Burning/Labeling Questions

[jmz93]

Hi folks.

I'm starting up a mastering business.  I plan on leaving disc duplication/replication to the big boys, but I'm still going to burn safety copies for clients, demos to hand out etc.  I have a couple basic questions.

Drives:
Does anybody online review burners for resulting playback quality, that is, jitter/block error rates?  I realize some of this is media dependent - right now I'm using Taiyo-Yuden CDR's based on a few recommendations.  Is that a reliable brand? 

Are some brands of drive superior, or is it a case of different manufacturers using the same guts, and just bundling their drives differently and with different software?

About labeling: I'm totally against stick-on labels, for a number of reasons.  So, eliminating those, my choices seem to be:
1. inkjet printing (color capable, but I'm guessing messy and expensive?)
2. thermal printing
3. Litescribe etching.

I'm guessing Litescribe discs, although not color, may look more professional. Any opinions?  What do you guys prefer? 

I remember hearing about Litescribe drives when they first came out, but I have no idea how well they were accepted by the public, or if they require special discs.

Thoughts/opinions welcome. 

Chris, ctsMastering

[rjp]

Litescribe, while it's pretty neat in concept, is really not all that practical. It takes over a half hour to apply a disc-sized image. Even worse, the image often is a bit faint, and needs to be burned-in a second time (another half-hour-plus). They require special media; after you've burned the disc, you flip it over and run the Litescribe software to burn the image onto the disc. It's a nice novelty for occasional use, but useless for much beyond that. I tried it a few times, and then went back to using a Sharpie.

Regarding printing, I'm not sure which is better... is the "thermal" printing a thermal-transfer technique that uses a ribbon?

Taiyo Yuden has generally been considered the gold standard for CD-R media. In my own experience, TYs are the only burned discs that will play in my father's ancient Technics CD player.

[mmadd29]

I picked up an Epson R-280 a few months back on Craigslist for $50.  I have had zero issues with printing disks, and they print in about 3 minutes.  No smearing, and the quality is good.

Hope that helps.....

[jmz93]

Thanks for the replies guys! much appreciated.

[live2496]

Hi Chris,
I am doing the same thing... so here are some conclusions I have made.

Use Taiyo Yuden discs. They burn with low error rates. Silver discs have a lower error rate that the gold, but the gold discs do not oxidize, so they are better for long-term storage. I have opted to use silver discs for masters client copies and ones destined for the duplication vendor. I will store my audio on hard discs for now, but CDROM or DVD might be used as well.

Plextor drives are the best and have been known to do great DAE too. You can measure BLER error rates of your burned discs with Plextools, but it only works with older drives like the PX-700 series, the premium and the premium 2. They have a newer utility called PlexUtilities which works with the newer drives. Plextor does not manufacture their own drives anymore and the newer drives are Lite-On rebranded drives. I got one recently (PX-880SA) and the BLER error rate for C1 is about 0.4 at 8x and currently I am not getting any C2 errors.

What I plan to do is to get some blank pre-printed Taiyo-Yuden discs with my company logo silk screened on the disc and to leave an area for titles. I will use permanent marker for the writing. Artist name, and date. Maybe a serial number for the master for cataloging. This will give a brand presence plus a fast and easy way of labeling. You can get a small printer for titles if you want to go that route.

You can get silk-screened discs from WTSmedia.com for .51 for one color and .81 for 3-color printing (just to give you some idea). For test discs I will use unprinted discs which cost about 28 cents.

Gordon