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?"

Comments

Re:Plextor

[spiralscratch]

Agreed. I've always had excellent results with Plextor drives, and have seen nothing but great reviews for them.

I do wish Yamaha still manufactured CDR drives. Theirs were just as good as Plextor's.

Some quick tips:

Always burn at a slow speed. For a master I can't recommend going higher than 4x. 2x is probably best.

Dedicate as much RAM as possible to buffer the data stream between the source and the CD you are burning.

Try to stick with internal drives. While the ATA-to-USB/firewire bridges work quite well, it's just one more thing to possibly cause problems.

One drive per channel (SCSI excepted). Don't place another drive on the same IDE channel as the CDR drive. If you must use external drives, give each a dedicated USB/firewire connection to the computer.

As for media, I've heard rumors that the discs produced in Japan are of better quality than those made elsewhere, but have never seen anything to back this up. I'd always had great results with Kodak media in the past, but it seems they don't make discs anymore. You may want to check and verify.

Mastering

[RomSteady]

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.