Need help with cd or dvd burning


I was thinking of burning cd,s or dvd's from my PC if some of you do that, what cd's or dvd's do you buy for best sound? and what site do you recommend offers high resolution or uncompressed sound? I currently have a bunch of memorex cd-r's 52x 700 mb 80mn, any good?
Or maybe I should just keep buying my cd's.
Thank you
tesseract86

Showing 3 responses by dhl93449

Verbatim and others make a burnable "gold" CD-R disc for high quality archive grade CDs. MFSL also has these, but they are very pricey.

Otherwise use Taiyo-Yuden or Verbatim professional grade CD-R to create discs with the lowest error rates. Burn at the lowest speed you can stand to maximize quality.

I also use a CD scanning software utility for my Plextor drive that scans the burned discs for errors. You want BLER (block error rates) below about 20 C1 errors max at any one point, and an average below 1 or 2 for the whole disc. C2 errors should be zero.

For music, your source files should be "bit perfect" if possible.

I have been scanning a number of MFSL discs and Japanese imports lately. All have been excellent and surpass my criteria above. Even MFSL discs that are 10+ years old. So my point is if you can buy material for a reasonable price (compared to the cost of your time to burn your own), then by all means buy it. And I am not considering the quality of the remastering process, which may add further benefit to buying something as opposed to burning a file from an older rip.

Even the latest commercial US products are looking pretty good from an error point of view. The version/mastering may be another issue.
Hifihvn:

I have another post on using BLER. But I found that the BLER test needs be run as slow as the CDROM will read. I have used 4X and 10X, both giving close to identical results (because the 10X actually runs 4-6X for most of the scan). When I ran read scans at 48X, the scan found C1 and C2 errors in the thousands. The same disc read under 20 C1 errors (max) with an average under 1 C1 (entire disc) and no C2 errors when the scan speed was 4-6X.

So it stands to reason that when copying, the slower the read the better. I am not sure if CDROMs have a playback speed control, but I think there is dedicated software to do this in a utility. Most DVD/CDROMs in computers these days want to run at 48X, and they will be correcting for a lot of read errors.

Using "secure" ripping software like dBpoweramp will also assure a "bit perfect" rip of copy of your CD. They use a file compare system that compares your ripped file with an online database of others who have ripped the same album. If the database has two or more identical entries, then dBpoweramp claims the bit error in the copy is essentially zero. If you are also using this software with a CDROM that has C2 error detection support, then there are further assurances that your copy is exact.

Regarding the use of "PCs" to manipulate and playback high end music files, check out "computeraudiophile.com" They have also found that there is a lot more than meets they eye when building a music server.
The other thing I forgot to mention. A home burned CD will probably not have as low an error count as a commercial CD. This is due to the fundamental difference in how these are produced. So if you can find a commercial version that sounds acceptable, I would go with that.