The Best Burners?

I've loved my Liteon drives for years and never had any probs with them. They're pretty cheap at newegg.com too.

this is not intended to dis anyone

Pioneer, Sony Plextor.
some would argue Plex does a better job with errors i disagree
plex comes with a tool for checking that the others dont.
however wave labs has the same tool even better.
Media often plays a more important part than you think.

there are several i would never use

Lite-on, Asus, Acer, some no name off the wall brand.

Scott
ADK

The only thing you really need to make sure of when using/purchasing a combo burner, is to make sure it will support CD "disk at once". If it says "track at once", or anything else, no good for audio CDs. It must say what I indicated above. Disk at once! That is only applicable to CDs and not to DVDs. We're not talking DVD audio here either. That's a whole 'nother animal.

The only thing you really need to make sure of when using/purchasing a combo burner, is to make sure it will support CD "disk at once". If it says "track at once", or anything else, no good for audio CDs. It must say what I indicated above. Disk at once! That is only applicable to CDs and not to DVDs. We're not talking DVD audio here either. That's a whole 'nother animal.

i second pioneer, sony or plextor as well...

and i second that the media / burner combo plays a vital part in achieving quality DVDs and CDs without errors... that's something you best have to figure out yourself...

for CDs for example i do very well with an old sony CRX 160 firewire and verbatim super azo, for me a suitable combo no probs!!

Also look for the "buffer underrun prevention" feature.

picture a glass that has a hole at the bottom and if you pour liquid into it the fluid will start pouring out of the hole at the bottom.

Data written to a CD-R or DVD-R is similar to this. All is good if the data is flowing in one continuous flow but..... If you stop adding liquid for a sec (which sometimes happens in computers) to the glass (during burning) what happens is the liquid (data) that is already in the glass will run out creating a 'buffer underrun' and the burner will stop writing to the disc.

Hello,

my vote goes for Plextor.

My best,

Guy Cefalu
Sonica Audio Labs

thx for the replies....i was lookin at the plextor and pioneer. Guess ill go with the plextor. And gotta agree that the Media is just as important. Avoid HP, Maxwell Cd's. TDK <---very trustable.

Plextor is top of the heap. Anything else is an also ran although Sony and Pioneer are very good. If you can afford it go with Plextor.

The advice on good media is spot on. Plextors can be finicky with less than stellar media so spend the money on the good stuff. Your music is worth it.

I have had zero problems with a Plextor Premium and also with a Sony. Hundreds of discs burnt, don't recall a single failure; even when using questionable discs. But the Plextor is nice because it comes with PlexTools which comes in handy.
I have used a tower-style duplicator loaded with Plextor drives, and it is finicky with cheap media. Perfect with Taiyo Yudens though.

I've got a fairly fancy USB DVD drive here that has never been hooked-up! And I've had it for a year! It ain't likely to be hooked up, by me - I'm getting a Plextor(The best they sell is hardly all that expensive, considering what it's for.). I've seen too many positives about them - enough is enough! Never a Sony or Pioneer fan anyway, so that's no deal for me.

Far as "media" - try it all!!! Use the cheapest stuff that works. My ancient OEM LG CD machine doesn't falter on the cheapest any more than the "best"(Everytime I've had problems it's been a "set-up" question or a software issue or shear dumbness on my part.)...

TG