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Please let me know what you think about this PLEXTOR - L890SA?
I need a slow burning drive with the PlexUTILITIES for mastering. This one comes with it and it's not expensive.

i know that a slow mastering burning at x2 or x4 is good, this one i'm not sure if it goes below x8?
Can i use this Plextor? Can anybody recommend or help me with this?

Thank you for the help!

Comments

Massive Mastering Thu, 09/20/2012 - 08:50

1) You never want the cheapest drive in the bunch.

2) You don't want Plex Utilities -- You want PlexTools Professional (which is only available on drives that are no longer manufactured).

i know that a slow mastering burning at x2 or x4 is good

Yeah, but only in 1995 when a $1500 SCSI CD drive ran at 8X...

3) You don't want slow burning -- Almost universally, you want to be somewhere between 25-33% of a drive's rated speed. Some closer to 50% -- Media dependent in many cases.

That all said -- Is the drive capable of authoring a disc? Most likely. The quality of the media is probably going to have a MUCH bigger impact (the "state of the disc universe" is still absolutely horrible right now -- To the point that I almost never send out discs anymore and opt for the much more robust DDP). The drive is certainly important -- But the drive is only as good as the media you feed it. Not a few months ago, it took me 79 discs to burn 16 discs within spec. Not within my spec (I'm much pickier than RedBook), just within RedBook's BLER specs.

Trex Thu, 09/20/2012 - 10:50

Ok, thank you "Massive Mastering" for the info!

Bottom of the line, what's my options? I'm using Sequoia 12, I have pack of "Green Tune" Mastering CD-R and two good optical drives in my new workstation PC, that i know i can burn at X8, but - i do not have any software tool to check for errors after burning.

Can you or anybody recommend of an external or internal drive good for mastering?

P.S, i do have a TASCAM DV-RA1000, but i don't think i can use it with my PC??

Thank so much!