Best CD Burner

Plextor and Sony. I have used several models from Plextor and one from Sony. They were all good. Audio extraction yields the same result each time even without EAC.

Try doing some searches, there was a thread on this 3 days ago:

http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showt...ghlight=burner

If you need more information than in the thread or the associated links check out Hydrogen Audio (http://www.audio-illumination.org/) and do a search there.

Zin

Get a SkipDoctor and buff out your CDs, then EAC Rip them.

http://www.skipdoctor.com/

I use this all the time, and it does the trick 95 percent of the time.

I'm sure there's detractors to using skipdoctor, which sands down your disks and replaces big scratches with lots of little microscopic ones that the laser can read through, but since you're planning to make a replacement / archival-backup CD and listen off of that anyway, that shouldn't be much of a consideration.

Also works great on anihilated library CDs or rented DVDs that don't work. Nothing like paying 5 bucks for a DVD rental and then have it not play.

The only time I have difficulty with this is when the scratches are in perfect circles around the disk. It's about 50/50 on those. This is usually due to a bad player. I've seen CD drives eject CDs while still spinning, when it sets the disk down into the try while in motion, the CD scuffs against the tray.

EDIT: You can find these things everywhere. Music stores, RatShack, BestBuy, etc.

How much is a skipdoctor?

Don't forget Yamaha - the CRW-F1 is among the best burners at the moment. It's also very good in ignoring copy protections...

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

Better buy the F1 now, everyone, as Yamaha's just announced they're getting out of the CD/RW business.

A treatise on CD Archival Backup

Long but hopefully informative. I've spent quite a bit of time improving my techinques.....

They run 29 bucks.

RatShack, "mall" cd stores, electronics/cd/movie superstores.
http://www.radioshack.com/product.as...%5Fid=26%2D497

They also have it branded as, DVDDoctor, GameDoctor. They're all identical so you can get whichever.

I've seen 3 flavors of the kit.

One kit gives you an extra sanding disc, the other gives you a sanding pad (a small piece of foam with sandpaper on it) that can be handy for spot-work buffing out of really deep scratches.

They also sell replacement kits for the items that get used up.

1 sanding disk is good for about 50 CDs, if you make sure you wash it under running water after each sanding session (gets the plastic gunk out of the grit)

I saw a special kit at costco (a wholesale club) that came with extras of everything. Had like 50 or 60 bucks worth of stuff if you bought them separately, for 29 bucks. Didn't get it cause I'm already stocked up.

I have a LiteOn DVD 163 I use for ripping with EAC. I use my plextor 24x for burning only. Burners have heavier heads in them (there's a burning laser strapped on there), so they're prone to wear out quicker than read-only drives due to the extra weight getting moved around. I let the 163 take all the abuse since I can get one for about 50 bucks. Oh, I let the plextor have a few minutes to cool off between burns to help extend it's life.

I've occasionally try using my plextor to rip when the LiteOn fails even after sanding (plextors are well known for reading anything), but I've never had better luck. Those were usually cases of label side damage, or heavy tray scuffing (earlier post in this thread) which are often hopeless.

Even the best drives won't read everything. I have very good drives and still need skipdoctor. Before skipdoctor, I used those paste kits, where you use wax to fill in the cracks. Those helped about 60-70% of the time, but skipdoctor is up in the 90%s

It's your disks that are broken, probably not your drives fault it can't read them, so don't expect a new drive to definitely solve your issue.

You can research different drives here
http://www.cdspeed2000.com

See where your current drive ranks. Maybe your drive is known to not be good at dealing with scratched disks, or maybe it's one of the best already.

Look under TestResults -> DAE Results for rip rankings. Be sure to click on drives you might be interested in and read the reviews.
The kenwoods are way up there, but when you read the reviews, you find they have reliability issues. Lite on is some of the cheapest stuff you can buy, but their products have gotten awesome in recent years.

Thanks for the treatise, Cyberius. I'm looking up cdspeed2000 on a new page as I write.

I've heard that the F1 uses "more space" when burning audio and that means fewer errors on original CDs. I still haven't bothered to research what that means.

scrypt: Yes, the F1 (and I think there's a Plextor with similar function available, too) has the option to use the maximum speed for burning audio cds (the possible speed range for a regular audio cd was from 1.2 to 1.4 m/s, if I remember that correctly). The effect, according to Yamaha, is that when you playback such burned cds, the length of pits and lands is longer than usual, thus the drive can read read the data more precisely and with less jitter. To my shame, I haven't tried it, yet, although I have a test sample in the office - but our test engineer has tried it and noticed a difference, although he's not a big audio freak...

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

SkipDoctor, no, thanks!

I have very bad SkipDoctor experience, mine is somewhere in a box. As Cyberius said is just a desperate resource.

If you want professional scratch repair, use:

www.skippydisc.com

They've repaired some unplayable discs for me and got them back to semi-brand new.

[Lini:]

One problem I see with that method: It only works with discs capable of being burned at maximum speeds. In many cases, high-end discs (such as Quantegy Gold and Kodak Ultima) are not capable of that. Which is a problem for people who find gold discs to be more reliable over time.

A possible distinction: It sounds as if you might be talking about depth and my friend might be talking about width. You seem to be talking about how deeply the laser cuts into the disc (which can be adjusted on my Plextor 48A as well), whereas my friend seems to mean the *space between* each cut.

In any case, those who want the Yamaha burner need to pick one up soon.

Scrypt: You might have got me wrong (or I haven't described that audio burning function well enough). The point is that regular audio cd players can play cds with the above-mentioned speed-range. Now the Yamaha will record with longer pits and lands with its audio burning option (which supports 8x speed max on the F1, as far as I remember) and set the servo information on that disc accordingly. So when you play it in a any regular player afterwards, this player will run with 1.4 m/s - thus the transitions from pit to land and vice versa are steeper, so the signal edges are better defined. There's no deeper engraving envolved, though, whatsoever... I hope this explanation is better, now.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

the audio quality mode's fastest burning speed is 8x, but it will slow down if it feels the media should be better burnt at 4x. i use this pretty often, but i've yet to really a/b the quality of it with my headphone rig. i'm fairly interested in the outcome, because my preliminary listening sessions were pretty positive. the quality mode burn sounded slightly smoother and less sharp/harsh/tinny. it was pretty interesting.

i use my burner to rip everything. mainly because 1) my dvd-rom has a nasty problem where at 18:02 on every single cd i try to rip, it causes a spike of static. 2) on my older plextor 12x drive, i burned thousands of cds and ripped thousands more. it still works perfectly. 3) my dvd-burner is kinda slow at ripping in general and i tend to try and save that one for dvd burning since the yamaha 44x really tears through any cd i give it anyway.

the yamaha is an awesome drive. i've been rather happy with it ever since i got it. the disc t@ttoo thing is pretty fun too. i burned a bunch of demos for a friends' band and all the record exec guys were quite "ooh'd and ahh'd" when they saw the artists' names on the bottom of the cd.

I don't know if its a problem with my Sony burner (48x24x48) but i'm running it as a slave to my DVD-Rom, and when i burn CDs, it really slows down, crawling along... and keeps cutting off my internet (USB) access...

I think there must be a conflict there somewhere, else I need yet another new PSU with more juice