In your opinon whats the best brand of CD-R or CD-RW for music? A friend of mine who's a recording engineer here swears by Phillips, but I wanted to see what y'all say.
On my equipment, none of which is top-shelf stuff, I don't notice any difference in any CD-R's... Further, I've never paid more than $2.99 for a spool of 50 discs, after rebate. My kid burns like 20 discs a week, and my wife is forever making workout discs, and I've never had them ask me to upgrade or change the ones I buy so cheaply.
I burn CD's on my PC, which is a fairly good system but certainly not top of the line. I recently burned about 50 copies of my new cd on Memorex CD-R's and I haven't found a bad one in the bunch. I also had no problems with a box of Verbatim CD-R's that I had before that. I DID have problems with a some Imation CD-R's, though. I'd say about 1 out of 5 seemed to have issues of some sort.
i don't think the brand matters so much. just make sure you don't buy the ones labeled 'cd-r music'. they are exactly the same as any other cd-r, the only difference is that they cost more and that extra money goes to the riaa. similar to blank cassettes.
I could be wrong but I think as an audio engineer, your friend is looking too hard to find a difference and thinks he's found one. They are all the same, they all store 1's and 0's and as long as they are burned properly and read properly, there is no difference. There's certainly a difference is analog media, but not in digital media. The difference in brand lies on the lifespan of the disc, and the durability of the disc, not the audio quality. I do believe though that the different colored bottoms may have an impact on the quality of the music, but that's just because the color effects how well it is burnt onto the disc. Don't buy TDK's, I think about 10 out of the 50 did't work. But I've used PNY's before and it seems they've lasted a long time, only problem is my bunch has this funky smell to them, almost like syrup. It's really weird. But I've had some Acer's and those seemed to work fine and then I bought some Hotan's one time and no problems with those either.
Re: Re: CD-R recomendation Agreed. My friend's recomendation was based on reliability not sound quality. Given his occupation you uses litereally thousands of the beasts and his favoring of that particular brand was owing to an almost no failure rate. I was curious to see what people outside of the professional environment had to say though. People like me who are going to be burning on their crappy home computer or what not.
Get your Sunday paper out, and pull out the flyers for Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, Office Max, Office Depot, Comp USA and any other computer, stereo, or music/video chain...every week at least one of them has a crazy deal with rebate, and often times you can even get a spool of 100 at that low price. You have to wait about 2 months for the rebate check, but in the end it's worth it. Best Buy's got a 50-pk of Imation CD-R's for $12.99 with a $10 rebate (net cost...$2.99) available this week...
The first that I ever used were Imation, they suck. Mine did anyway. I handled them carefully, but after a couple dozen listenings each they ALL skipped, skipped, skipped. Maybe I was just unlucky. Now I use Memorex and I havent had a problem yet, got some that I've listened to a hundred times.
Not true, if you're burining on a PC then yes, CDR-Music is the same as CDR, but if you have a stereo component burner you can ONLY use CDR-Music, I have both.
I've almost always used Memorex as my preferred CD-R's. I usually have no or very minimal failure rates (1 in 50) and the actual discs hold up quite well. And believe me when I say I abuse the hell out of every single CD I've ever owned. They almost never see a sleeve or case after being burned and get tossed all around the passenger's seat. I've used some cheaper brands before and just one or two days in my car usually resulted in some serious scratches that rendered them almost unplayable. As for the CD-R Audio and CD-R debate ... I've used both kinds on my home computer (Memorex Brand) and I can honestly say I've only noticed one difference in them and that's the play side of the CD. On the regular CD-R, it's colored blue while the CD-R audio is the standard silver. This doesn't really matter on CD players made in the past 5 or 6 years ... But my car CD player is rather old and it absolutely HATES the blue CD's. It hardly ever accepts them. So, I go with the CD-R Audios to make it easier on it and me. (And as a side note, I bought a lareg pack of Avery's CD labels about a year ago and I'll stick one on every CD I burn as a precaution against label side scratching. It seems to work fairly well, especially on those cheaper CD's, since scratching can occur on either side)
true. thanks for writing that. i assumed he meant a computer cd-r. you know what happens when one assumes!