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Professional CD-R and DVD-R Burners/Duplicators?
burnWell asks: "I work for a software publisher, and when preparing CD media for final distribution to the manufacturer (the Gold Master if you will), we often find that our CD and DVD burns are not very good quality. Are there any recommendations for professional grade, highest quality CD-R and DVD-R writers? Are there any tools or metrics we should use to verify how 'good' a particular burn happens to be, and to that end, how well behaved some brands of media are versus another? Are there recommendations for the very highest quality CD-R and DVD-R duplicators?"
I always had great luck with Plextor's old (in the 2-4x) readers and writers.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Make sure you are using Taiyo Yuden blanks for burning CDs. Usually, media quality causes the most problems. I compared TY to Verbatim with kprobe -- BIG difference. Verbatim has an average of 8 errors per sector, while Taiyo Yuden had 0.2. Look for CD-Rs made in Japan -- they are Taiyo Yuden (often, they are sold as "music" CD-Rs).
You actually have a couple of major problems. There have been some fairly exhaustive tests done in the audio realm, and they have found a couple of things.
The first is that the specific brand that works best will vary from one CD burner to another. The only thing that you can do is buy a lot of samples and try burns at different speeds and with different brands until you know what gives you the best results.
As noted, slower burns usually are better, but the optimal speed will vary too.
The other problem is that manufacturers change their formulations from time to time. You of course have no way to know this, but may find that the media that worked great last month suddenly has problems.
Another test can be found here.
Three Squirrels
Yes, DVD masters are typically delivered on DLT. DVD Studio Pro has direct support for doing this.
Actually, Yggdrasil Linux was responsible for writing the first open source tool for producing DVD masters on tape, which they used for releasing a DVD-based Linux distro back in... 1998? Info about it here.
That said, for CD mastering use CD-Rs that are designed to be used as masters (they are REAL gold media, and are not cheap, ~US$10ea), burn at 1x, make sure your disc is *really* standard compliant...
Also, for mastering DVDs you need to be certain to have a drive which will write the CSS bits. Standard drives won't, and mastering drives cost ~$1k, last I checked, because of all the licensing required for implementing CSS.
Qualifications: I am no longer at Microsoft, but when I was at Microsoft, I burned the gold masters for eight seperate titles, including seven that used SafeDisc.
For our CD's, we used Mitsui primarily. They were a decent balance between cost and reliability. We'd also always submit to our release labs at least five copies of each CD.
Finally, we'd use a tool (CRC 3.05, available to MSDN subscribers in Subscriber Downloads) which would calculate the CRC value of each CD. Once we finished burning a CD, we'd do a binary compare with the source bits, and if everything matched up, we'd add the CD to our "good" pile.
For the first several (spread out over three years), we used a PlexWriter 2x writing at 1x to burn. We also used Goldenhawk CDR-WIN to burn the masters, but had to switch to Prassi once Goldenhawk stopped putting in the proper postgap on the CD's.
For our final disks, we went with a PlexWriter 48x writing at 16x.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
One of my favorite places to shop for such goodies is Markertek. It doesn't cost you anything to have them send you a catalog.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
I'll take that one step further: deliver the ISO on a DVD-RAM. Don't bother with +/- R or RW. A DVD-RAM is a much more stable medium.
While I'm here, I'd recommend the LG DVD burners. I've got one, and I know a number of others who do, and they seem to be very good. The old Plextor drives were good too; haven't tried any current ones though.
-- Steve
http://www.cdrinfo.com/
Has some very detailed reviews, including detailed quality analysis tests with many combinations of drives and media.
I worked in a mastering house for two years, and now provide off and on technical consultation on qc issues..
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We've always used Taiyo Uden's. Big surprise.
Making a hash/md5sum is pretty silly and is one layer above what you need to be checking.
What you need to check are the block errors/specifically c1/c2 errors.
When a cd is authored, it is authored to cd with subcode that can not be changed in the slightest.
Q-bit subcode is the term for the information on a compact disc that holds the track number, track length, and time in track.
Any change results in bad crossfades, blips and other ugliness.. Some plants have been known to extract the audio and redo it, and generate crap.
Most masterhouses know which ones these are and stay away from them.
Whats important are c1/c2 errors.
Check http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.
for a technical description.
C1 is error correction for the block error rate (BLER), which consists of bit errors at the lowest level. BLER is normally given in errors per second. The typical maximum BLER for quality recording is 220 errors per second.
C2 error correction applies to bytes in a frame (24 bytes per frame, 98 frames per block) and is an indication of the drive's attempt to use extended error correction to recover the data. Even a few C2 errors can be an indication of poor media quality or a drive's inability to write or read correctly.
CU error correction applies to uncorrectable errors, or errors that are present after C2 level correction. No CU errors are allowed in a recorded disc. CU errors are usually a result of damage to a disc and represent unrecoverable data. Discs with CU errors quite often cannot be read.
The acceptable number of c2 errors is zero for a disc sent to the plant.
A simple check with kprobe or plextools pro will validate your disc, your burn, your burner, and whether or not you really should be smoking in the computer room..
Once it hits the plant, the disc is reread, all samples, subcode intact and a glass master is made to create the pits in the substrate..
Some manufactured discs, have more c1's than a typical burn, this could lead to early death due to scratches.. HMMM..