DCC Archive Your favorite CD-R & CD-RW media?

Now, Maxell has always made a hell of a tape. But they made their own tape! Unless they make their own PRO CD-Rs they don't make ANY CD-Rs. They contract out.

I have five year-old verbatum discs, made on an old Ricoh burner, and the old Corel CD Creator before Adaptec bought it, and at 1x in TAO mode, and the thing still plays perfectly. All of my verbatum discs perform flawlessly. Ditto for Maxell PRO, for now.

There are old, CD-R bootlegs made with supposedly unstable yellow dye out there that still play just fine.

It's easy to forget that some people still use old 5-year old+ burners that cannot perform calibration, so, of course they will have trouble with some brands. TDK was quite unpopular some years ago because many burners were not optimised for them.

Speed is also another issue people ignore or overlook. Most people want to burn Cd-Rs as fast as they can, but that isn't always possible, then they get angry when brand X won't work, so they think brnd X is bad. Why does TDK come to mind?

I understand that some people have trouble burning and/or playing back gold Mitsui or Kodak CD-Rs. I use the silver/gold Kodaks without any problems.

Black CD-Rs marketed by memorex also work very well for me.

 

Hi Sckott: Thanks for the reply- I bought my PC in early 1999. Motherboard is an Abit BH6, Celeron overclocked to 450Mhz, RAM upgraded to 256K, 10G IBM Deskstar HardDrive, running Windows 98SE. The discs I bought were labeled 24x.

 

Experiment with your burns. My work beast, a 400mhz/66 bus Celeron Slot 1 with 128 megs of Ram won't burn let most burners bank a burn higher than 8X, and that's burning with only Windows (explorer, systray) runnning. If anything's running in the background, it's tit's up, most every time. Needless to say, I'm using an HP 4X burner at work because it's cheap, it's mine, and it's less fiddle time anyways. When I slap that machiene in the "Loose parts" drawer, I'll possibly have a 32X burner then for "experimentals".

Burning at wikkid fast speeds means you have to have ballsy PC power. Again, if the burner works at 16-20X, then so be it.

A lot of clients I get end up with only 12X-24X burner choices in retail stores. As long as they realize that getting 4X-8X burners for their machiene can be more difficult than merely burning slower for thier 333-450Mhz PCs, they respect the boundaries and look twords why they want to get a better system2-3 years down the road, if they want the high of speedy burns. Most don't care about waiting an extra 10 minutes burning.

3-4 years from now, it'll possibly be a nill subject for you. You'll HAVE the speedy PC and a better burner. DO what works for you, bottom line, and be happy!