MoFi CDR blanks

[Rspaight]

THE USE OF ERROR CORRECTION DOES NOT MEAN YOUR DATA STREAM HAS ERRORS.

Argh. That drives me crazy. That and the "your CDs sound better if the error-correction circuitry isn't doing anything."

I wonder if these guys' heads would explode if we told them that data is stored on an audio CD completely out of order and is reassembled by the error-correcting algorithm. (So that a small disc defect will not take out many consecutive bits of information.) So the error-correcting circuitry is working all the time, no matter how "perfect" your disc is.

Actually, I tried to tell them that once. They ignored me.

Ryan

[Dob]

"your CDs sound better if the error-correction circuitry isn't doing anything."

Wasn't that the argument behind the effectiveness of the green markers?

[Rspaight]

Yup, exactly. That and any number of mystery lotions and salves to be lovingly rubbed onto your discs.

Ryan

[dcooper]

I have a dumb question...

Isn't the type of material used to construct a CD-R the LEAST important part of the path with regards to musical reproduction? Wouldn't the speed of your drive, quality of your ripping and burning software, and specs of your sound card be much more important than the quality of the storage device?

[Crummy Old Label Avatar]

I would say that the quality of the rip is first and foremost. Unless the drive or the CD itself is damaged, any modern drive should be able to achieve a perfect rip, so long as you are using good software, such as Missing Media Burner for Mac or EAC for Windows. However, I have extensively compared ripping results between Toast 6 and Missing Media Burner (using the "CD Paranoia" mode), and they turn up identical each time. The ripper in Toast 6 is damn good, really, and since it it is easy to use (GUI instead of Missing Media Burner's arcane command lines), I pretty much stick to Toast now for ripping.

The iTunes ripper (both Mac and PC versions) is crap, however. I would recommend you avoid it. It chokes on problem (scratched) discs, and cannot extract any tracks correctly, time-wise. It does weird things with the gaps between the tracks, etc.

We've all gotten hold of CD-Rs that won't burn correctly, etc. Of course I've gotten great results with very cheap CD-R media. Longevity is the real question. Most cheap media falls apart really quickly, even if you can get a perfect burn onto it.

I've been content sticking with TDK and Fuji CD-R's. They are widely available and relatively cheap. You can get a box of 50 TDK CD-R's with colored slim cases at Costco for less than $20. Yes, they are the "Made in Taiwan" ones, which so many people tell you to avoid. Why, I don't know. I've been using the Taiwanese TDK and Fuji discs for years now, and I've never had a Taiwanese TDK or Fuji go bad on me, not once.