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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?"
If you must use a CDR, find a few different kinds of media, burn slow, and compare. But have you considered just delivering the original as an ISO?
Publishers will almost always take the data in a different format (iso) or on tape. Why do you assume that just because you are giving them the data on CD they are copying all the bit errors on the disc? They probably just stick it in a drive and read the data track with error correction (and make test disc or two to be sure) before feeding it to the presses for mass production.
Please, one call to your publisher would have had this explained to you.
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).
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.
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
Why not use SFTP/SCP or somthing to transfer the .ISO (or equivalent image) to a secure site? Or why not send them on protable 2.5" hard disk or something more reliable than CD's if you are having these issues? Heck, even compact flash is cheap these days, 1GB shouldn't set you back too much and it is quite easy to determine if the file exists properly. Let the manufacturers worry about getting the image right, it is their butt on the line after all.
Another thing would be to simply burn it, then use a tool to verify that the disc was burned correctly and reliably. Heck you could even do your own sample test and do other interesting metrics like how long it takes to complete the verification - possibly an indicator of how many errors were encountered in the read process.
Better yet, just offer the files up on your web site and let customers burn their own CD's if they feel they really need them.
http://www.cdrinfo.com/
Has some very detailed reviews, including detailed quality analysis tests with many combinations of drives and media.
A common misconception - Plextor used to be the absolute best. Honestly they have been falling from the throne since they released the PX-708A (which is the predecessor to the PX-712A (which is the predecessor to the PX-716A.))
The 708A had pretty good quality burns, but they still did not qualify as excellent. But lots of people reported problems with this drive and CD media in general. It had a tendency to somehow get 'stuck' on DVD-only mode and not read any CD media, pressed or burned. My own 708A only read CD (pressed and burned) at 4X and actually left scuffs on them. I spoke to many people on forums about this and it was widely reported, some people going through two and three RMAs. I returned it to costco and got another one which fortunately worked well. I paid CDN$300 for my 708A right when it came out and I still feel ripped of my money.
The PX-712A, while an excellent drive in theory that got very good reviews, still only had 'pretty good' burning quality, which IMO is not good enough for the most expensive drive in its class at the time. There were also a lot of burn quality problems, again with people going through two and three RMAs.
As to the PX-716A, it is simply not good enough to be worth its exorbitant price. Again the burn quality for CDR and DVDR is very good but not supreme. This is confirmed by PI/PO and C1/C2 scans in comparison to other drives of half the cost.
Every burner I have owned for the last 5 years was a Plextor, but I think it will stop here. The competition delivers better burn quality for much less money. Plextor's products are not rock solid anymore and I won't pay their price.
If you want the best CD-R burning on a drive today, get yourself an old Plextor Premium (back fomr the days when Plextor *was* the King of Quality) or get a very economical NEC-ND3500A which currenty owns the title for the lowest error rates on CDR and DVDR burns.
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..