I think most mastering engineers prefer Taiyo Yuden.

Johnjm22 wrote: I think most mastering engineers prefer Taiyo Yuden.

Yup. On Plextor Premium Series drives.

This is an ignorant question.....but what makes a high quality CDR high quailty?

The three main things are

(1) Quality control
(2) Quality control

and most importantly,

(3) Quality control

Better, cleaner, more precise equipment & materials and good management. Storage, turnaround... Everything.

There are really only a few factories that manufacture CD-R's... Arguably, the good ones come from Japan, and most (if not all) from the same factory (Apogee's very pricey reference discs are simply Mitsui Gold in another package - Another fine choice).

There are some discs of horrific quality that come from China... Not only does the error rate skyrocket over the Japanese discs (such as Tayio Yuden, Memorex, Maxell), but the discs physically are brittle and sometimes visually "foggy" plastics sneak in. I wish I could remember some brand names for you... Does CMC ring a bell? I could be wrong...

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Also, burn at the slowest speed your writer allows.

Not neccessarily - Burn at the speed that is most efficient for the drive. Most of the time, this is somewhere between 4 & 12X. One of the drives from my testing ran best at 24X (a Lite-ON unit), which I'm hoping, was an anomaly of a cheap drive that was out of balance somehow at low speeds). Still, the error rate towered over the Plextor.

If you have similar BLER consistently at several speeds, THEN, I'd default to the lowest of those speeds.

I have been researching the Taiyo Yuden brand and it seems promising... are there any other preferences out there that Massive hasn't mentioned yet? thanx guys!

Jon_The_Lefty wrote: I have been researching the Taiyo Yuden brand and it seems promising... are there any other preferences out there that Massive hasn't mentioned yet? thanx guys!

I've seen recommendations for other brands that read something like: "I've been using and i've never had any problems..."

Any comparison i've seen that gets into details (like Massive listed) always shows Taiyo Yuden at the top for audio CDs.

Oh, and i've been using Taiyo Yuden and i've never had any problems... :)

[Note] Actually, i did get a bad run of silver laser printables: 3 or 4 bad CDs out of the 100 pack, but i'll list that as a fluke....

http://www.klone.com

these have been closely compared to Taiyo Yuden, although MUCH cheaper. I use these mainly for duplication rather than masters (for now). So far, out of 250+ burns I have not had even 1 detectible error :shock:

For masters I have stuck with Mitsumi Gold.

ALL discs have errors - It's the type and frequency of those errors that counts. "Compare" type programs don't check the block-error rates (which is what will throw a disc out of compliance).

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John,

You have one of the most thorough mastering websites I have ever seen. 8-)

Thanks for the schoolage. I learned something valueable today.