Which blank CDs should I buy?

tomo_the_third

Hallo I was wondering if someone could give me some advice about blank CDs. I'm not sure which ones to buy, I mainly copy music onto them so I want good quality ones (how do I know which are good quality?) but I also just put photos on them sumtimes (am I right in thinking these don't need to be very good quality?) If someone could help me out that'd be great!

Cheers,
Tom

Rave

If anything I'd think that the photos would require higher quality discs if you were worried about keeping them longterm. However, in my experience CDR is such a mature technology that it's hard to buy bad discs. I've been using the Datasafe silver premiums from here for the last few months and all the discs that I've burned and then scanned for errors have been superb (when burned with my Yamaha CRW-F1).

slowen

Datawrite and datasafe are both reliable types of CDR, I have not come accross any bad CDR yet but it depends on how much money you want to spend per disc

Darksun

I'd always avoid 'unbranded' CD-Rs (although saying that, I have a stack of them, mostly just want to burn something unimportant I only need in the shortterm)

Mr_Skint_2

This sort....

mjhmjh2

There are all sorts of claims about certain CD format being better for music etc, although personally (as a bit of an audio-phile) I've not noticed any difference.*

There are however things to look out for. CD media has the reflective layer on the top of the disc. Whilst scratching the bottom of the disc is relatively difficult on most discs the top layer can sometimes be very thin and particularly vulnerable. The thicker the top layer the more resistant it tends to be. The branded dscs tend to be better than cheap unbranded (although this is not always true). White top discs seem to be a good half way, the top layer is pretty thick and resistant to scratching, it also gives you a nice big place to write/draw or stick labels on without the under laying logos showing through.

Data is stored differently between audio and data, audio does not have any error correction built in - a bad bit of the audio won't be instantly obvious, you may notice a click, pop or skip if you are unlucky. Data has error correction recorded on the disc although it works in a strange way as far as I understant it, you can damage the disc in a certain way and it will be fine, damage more than a certain amount and it's game over.

When recording music to CD there are a number of good practises. If recording from a compressed source you will always have a sub-quality copy. This applies to recording via a format, so if you record your original cd to mp3 then use the mp3 burn to another disc it will be lower quality than the original. Try to record disc to disc or capture as a WAVe file.

Any drive used to record from CD should be checked to make sure it is reliable - a free program such as audio grabber will do a test giving something called a check sum for a track - run it twice and check they match.

When burning to CD it's always worth dropping the recording speed a bit, if the computer can't quite keep up you can notice the odd click.

*The difference between coatings may be the factor in quality differences. The coating I imagine can break down in UV or just overtime. I'm guessing the better ones are more stable long term.

Hope that helps.
Matthew

tomo_the_third

Thanks very much everyone. Thanks 2 for what you said about losing audio quality when converting files Matthew - I'll bear that in mind. One thing I've noticed is that some CD-R packs will say 52x speed or something similar whereas others will say up to 52x speed or 2x - 52x. I've been told that the ones that just say 52x are low quality and don't allow you to burn at lower speeds. Is this right?

Thanks again,
Tom

zincoxide

tomo_the_third wrote:

Thanks very much everyone. Thanks 2 for what you said about losing audio quality when converting files Matthew - I'll bear that in mind. One thing I've noticed is that some CD-R packs will say 52x speed or something similar whereas others will say up to 52x speed or 2x - 52x. I've been told that the ones that just say 52x are low quality and don't allow you to burn at lower speeds. Is this right?

Thanks again,
Tom

Generally 52x CD's that are lowly priced are not worth buying, they can still be written at lower speeds but the quality of these is pretty poor.

I would highly recommend you buy tuffdisc, (i think https://www.tuffdisc.com) I use them for both CD's and DVD's, work perfectly for data/music/video. Never had a single problem with them, burn fine at high speed and put up with the evryday wear and tear they get around my car & home.

Plus, if you look on eBay, they are pretty darn cheap, can't remember the guy I bought them from but just do a search for tuffdisc and get your wallet ready!

rogerramjet

Still have a few gold ones hanging around begrudge using them as they cost £1.20 each at the time.....ahh the days of a 2 speed writer (not re-writer) which cost me £215.00......sad bit is it was only 1998 and it was a bargin at the time!

Over the years I've used branded, unbranded, "A" grade "B" grade. With the size of buffers on the cd writers these days very little bomb, but when they do it hasn't mattered who makes them but what I've been doing on the computer at the time....gone are the days of setting it up to burn then leaving it alone for 35 minutes while it burns, but at the same time using to many programs at the same time as burning discs can cause problems, maybe not a bombed disc but some data corruption.