Anyone Bought Commercially Released CDs That Seem to BE CD-Rs?

I've picked up a couple of Osamu Kitajima CD albums (Benzaiten and my favorite Masterless Samurai) directly from East Quest Records, Inc. - Dr. Osamu Kitajima »

They are made on demand it seems. The recording is high quality, definitely not a needle drop, with a high dynamic range. The quality of the inserts are very nice and the label/sticker on the discs are on a glossy paper, but they are on CD-Rs

 

I found out that the Retrospective UK PD label that is essentially ASV revived uses CD-Rs for everything but the Retrospective label discs are newly remastered.

 

Just received another 2CD set which is on CDR.

The Alarm - 2 Original Classic Albums - Strength / Eye Of The Hurricane

Just has RFD80M-79249 80 as the matrix code.

This is going back to Amazon.

 

the I believe the chris robinson brotherhood and maybe the black crowes have used these blacl looking cd's to replicate a vinyl look. also I think the slayer boxset uses them as well to look evil lol

 

The recent CD reissue of "Benzaiten" by Psychedelic Sounds International (a joint venture of Merlins Nose and Presch Media GmbH) is on a silver CD (it was also reissued by this label on LP in 2016). This Psychedelic Sounds CD states that it was licensed from East Quest Records, which was how I found Kitajima's website. I'll have to listen for "Masterless Samurai." I first heard an extract of "Benzaiten" (and did not hear the full album by Osamu Kitajima until recently) on the Greater Antilles Sampler LP back in 1976 or '77 (like so many other music lovers who bought that budget priced compilation, which also opened doors to White Noise, Nick Drake, Quiet Sun, and many others). It's kind of nice to still be discovering new-to-me music that had been briefly glimpsed as long as 40 years ago.

 

wow - i had no idea about this practice until reading about it recently in a wendy carlos thread. personally, i find the practice horrid. its bad enough that there are no standards around downloadable formats. now the format you use to think was 'reliable', may no longer be so. how do you know what you're getting quality wise? perhaps a nice disc built from lossy files.

i like how they try and sell it from an environmental perspective. i'm sure it has to do more with the bottom line.

 

Infotool confirmed that the Retrospective UK PD label uses CD-Rs and not replicated CDs although they sure look like replicated CDs including the silkscreened artwork, etc. The artwork is very professionally put together as well.

 

is anyone suggesting that a cd-r does not sound as good or better than a pressed cd? or are people just mad that they have been misled?

 

If you buy many Curb Records deep catalog discs brand new from many independent retailers, Amazon, etc., they are CD-R on demand, but if you come across some of these same discs at Walmart, they are pressed CDs.

 

I buy CDs from the '80s. They're all real.

 

I bought from Amazon Al Jardine's "A Postcard From California" and I received a CDR. I ended up selling it at a loss when the Japan regular CD version came out.

 

Here's the Nero InfoTool info on the Retrospective UK reissue of Vintage Children's Favourites and as you can tell, the CD-R info is filled as it is a CD-R



If a disc is a pressed CD, the CD-R info in InfoTool is blank (I used Raffi's Baby Beluga CD for this):

 

Brad, you should send these back and get a full refund for the purchase price including shipping. While I understand some sites are selling made on demand titles, those are normally labeled as such in the product information and the buyer is made aware prior to purchasing. When you unknowingly and unwillingly receive a CD-R in place of what should be a replicated CD, it's basically a form of theft. All of us need to take a stand and put a stop to these dishonest bait and switch practices.

 

A number of people have posed the question about the difference in quality between CD-R 's & CD's yet nobody on this thread has posted a reply.

So I ask again - provided the CD-R has been created correctly is there any difference in quality between it and a CD

or is this just a whinge & wank thread.

 

Whinge and wank, then repeat! Seriously, sound should be the same, though I'm sure some here will disagree! How long the CD-R's will last is another question?

 

There's no quality difference with regard to the sound. However, there are many CD players that do not play CD-R discs (especially older ones). Also, as Dr. Mudd pointed out, the longevity of CD-R discs is questionable. High quality ones should be fine if stored properly, but crappy ones - who knows? They could become unreadable in a few years.

 

Are you a lobbyist for a company which manufactures CD-Rs?

The main problem I have with CD-Rs is they don't play properly on my home system and I really don't care to listen to them on my home computer or in some junky boombox I would have to buy for that purpose. I can't comment in terms of the lifespan of a CD-R vs. a replicated CD, but based on my experience, the CD-Rs seem to scratch easier.

 

They won't last very long, that's the problem. We are talking magnitudes better longevity with normal CDs. In Sweden, the deceptive labels selling CDRs are also doing it at a higher price than CD. Nothing positive about the practice at all and has nothing to do with emotions.

 

Thanks for the replies on CD vs CDR's quality issue. So it seems that the issues revolve around
1) being able to play the disc on your player - which is simple it either plays or it doesn't. Consumer law is pretty straight forward here. If the product does not preform as expected it can be returned for full refund
2) The lifespan of a CD-R MAY be less than the lifespan of a CD. I started buying CD when they came out in the 1980's. I started burning CD-R's not long after they came on the market whenever that was.
Apart from discs that were physically damaged I have never had a CD or a CDR fail on me yet.


I've been buying music now for nearly 50 years (LP's & CD's) not once have I ever received a freebie from a record company. However I have received freebies for buying CD-R (blanks) on 3 different occasions from the manufacturer of the CD-R's. The fact that this Sony is what is strange because they are 1 of the big 4 record companies running the show these days.

The other thing is when I first started buying CD-R's they cost around $4.00 each. The price these days is around 50c each. Standard price CD's are around the same as they were when the first appeared.
The range of cheaper CD's is much wider nowadays. The price drop even for these items is still nowhere near the price drop in CD-R's. With the continued unabated whinging from the record companies regarding falling CD sales how come none of them seem to understand the simple basics of economics - supply & demand


I agree the manufacturer and seller should be making it perfectly clear if a disc is a CD-R

 

It may actually cost more to produce a small run of CD-R's as opposed to mass producing CD's. However I don't believe the physical cost of producing CD's (or CD-R's) has any true correlation with the selling price. Cost price pennies Sell price $$$$

 

I bought a 2-CD set by an independent band (Near Life Experience) putting out their own live set ("Live Bootleg"). CD-Rs. It was put out in the late 1990's. I have 2 sets of the release. All 4 discs used to play fine. Now all 4 have these terrible spike sounds in random places no matter what CD player or computer I try to play them on. It's a shame I didn't think to rip them earlier because they cannot be replaced.

 

I knew it was a CD-R as I was informed on Facebook that these are CD-Rs.

 

I've seen both failing CD's and CD-R's. I got a Lick Records CD that was pressed in the infamous UK plant that supposedly had a fault in the manufacturing process for a year or so in the late Eighties. The aluminium layer starts to oxidize - the discs slowly turn dark brown starting from the edge.

When I got my first CD-R writer in the late Nineties, I quickly learned there were basically three kinds of blank discs, depending of what dye was used in the writing surface. Some used azo, some used cyanine and some used phtalocyanine. Azo was easy to recognize by its colour, the writing surface was bright blue. IIRC, phtalocyanine was mostly golden yellow, and cyanine sort of paler shade of yellow.

Azo was the most stable (=fade resistant), phtalocyanine was supposedly good too, but cyanine was said to be relatively unstable, especially if exposed to sunlight. All my azo CD-R's are okay to this day, but some of the dodgier cyanine discs are unreadable despite them being stored in total darkness. Fortunately nothing of value was lost, as I've had a decent backup strategy through the years.

It was never a black and white type situation, but as a rule of thumb back in those days, Japanese discs were generally good (especially azos) and Indian/Chinese/etc discs seemed to be of lesser quality (especially cyanine ones, which they mostly were - I guess it's a cheaper dye). What made it difficult for the consumer was that there were more brands than factories, and you never knew what you were going to get unless you bought Verbatim or some other quality brand. I haven't checked for years as CD-R's have become obsolete as a backup medium, but I remember that at some point even Verbatim switched manufacturer from Taiyo Yuden to Moser Baer which definitely didn't sound like a good move.

 

Big issue here. Ever considered the fact that CD replication plants have minimum orders and glass mastering and setup fees?. Most CD replication plants tend to be expensive on under 10,000 pressings or won't accept much under that as a minimum order. Bear this in mind. Below a 5,000 copy order, in many cases duplicated CD-R is the only viable means of releasing it.

 

Exactly, for example a lot of European public domain labels release material NOT in high demand in the mainstream. I accept CD-Rs in this case but if it were something like the Curb deal where they pressed millions of CDs over the years and what is in print nowadays are on CD-R, it is cheaper and better to look for a pressed CD in the used market.