Optical Drives

[DiminishingReturnsOfficer]

I haven't completely given up on CD's yet. I've got a good CD player in my home system, and my car doesn't have an input for iPods or MP3 players, so I'm stuck with the silver disc. Anyway, I was thinking that since so much goes into playing CD's; there are literally thousands of high quality players on the market in just about every price range imaginable. Why is there so little available in the way of audio grade CD / DVD burners. Now-a-days, you can get a drive that will burn CD's at 40x, Dual Layer DVD's at 30x, and make lables with LightScribe for $30 just about anywhere. None of these would qualify as "audio grade" be it for their build quality or performance. About 5 years ago, Yamaha made a nice outboard burner that sold for about $250. From what I understand from some of the reviews, discs made on this machine using high quality black CD-R's at 1x speed, were noticably better sounding than the ones made with the $15 inboard optical multi-drive that came with the most recent Dell desktop (or pick your poison, I have nothing against Dell). I do notice that my original store bought CD's sound better than copies made on a burner.

The "Bits is Bits" philosophy might very well apply here, but it doesn't seem to be prevalent here on CA (thank Goodness), so I wonder if anyone has a rationale for the lack of high quality CD burners. I am aware that a CD made with a burner is fundementally different from one made by a recording lable for mass production. I certainly don't believe that price is the best indicator of quality, however, there is generally some relationship between the two. Currently, the most expensive optical drive I saw on the Web is a LaCie Blue Ray burner that sells for around $500. I have a HP optical drive that came with my HPE 270f desktop. It reads, but will not write Bluerays and does LightScribe. In search for a superior drive, I ended up buying an LG Blueray burner that did about 20 CD's, and about as many LightScribes, and then died. I replaced it with a Plextor 940S Blueray, DVD, CD burner. So far, I've been happy with it for the most part, though it has produced several coasters (under runs) in the 4 months that I've had it. I do see where there are used, refurbished, and very few new Yamaha burners (like the one I discussed earlier) available. Plextor made a drive that was said to be at least as good as the Yamaha, if not slightly better, but it is out of production too. Those big towering duplicators have the primary advantage of being able to make many, many copies in a short period of time. I don't think they claim to be any better in quality. The only other alternative I've seen is a Marantz CD Recorder that comes in a component package. I saw this machine online being used as a reference for a comparision of Toslink cables. I think it was Srajan of 6 Moons doing the shootout, but I wouldn't swear to it. Anyway, does anyone have any familiarity with this unit or others like it? Does anyone have an opinion on quality optical drives or CD burners?

 

[DiminishingReturnsOfficer]

Aww, C'mon, there has to be somebody out there with an opinion on this...

 

[sully22]

Pacific Valve is recommending the Plextor PX88OU $80.00 for use with their CyberServer. If you check it out let me know your thoughts.

 

http://www.pacificvalve.us/CYIndex.html

 

[DiminishingReturnsOfficer]

Sully,

Thanks for chiming in. The PX880 U is an outboard optical drive featuring Plextor's air managment technology and a dampened chassis. It would be a nice drive to aquire, in fact, I think this is the one that I was referring to that slightly nudged the Yamaha drive. It used to retail for $180 , but I see the price has come down a lot. The 880 is also available as an inboard drive for PC's, but I think that much of the advantage of the chassis and air flow technology would be lost inside a tower. The 880 U has LightScribe technology which is something I use regularly. Currently, I have the PX940SA inboard Bluray drive. It does a nice job with CD's, and DVD's, but I haven't tried any BD's yet. My purpose in getting this optical drive was to back up my iTunes library to BD. With 50 Gigs to a dual layer BD, I could fit the whole thing in 4 discs versus better than 30 on DVD. Unfortunately, iTunes does not support BD backups at this time.

 

[Gregor Samsa]

I think the drive that you are referring to is the late, lamented Yamaha F-1, which has been out of production for years. It had a unique burning pattern which operated on the theory that lengthening the pits and lands presented an easier task to the pickup laser. This allegedly reduced jitter, improved the sound, mitigated global warming, etc. It used more space on the CD-R, and very long albums didn't fit. It could also burn conventionally.

 

I used mine happily for years until it died last year. I think it did help the sound a bit. It gave some playback devices fits, and my Oppo would not play CD-Rs burned that way until a firmware update. Now I prefer the sound of computer sources and I only use burners to make CDs to listen to in my car or to give to friends, so I haven't intensely investigated finding a replacement . If you come across one at a decent price on ebay or the like don't hesitate. Also, as implied before, burn at a low speed. 1X might be overkill, but not over 8X.

 

[sully22]

DiminishingRetu,

 

Good info.

In addition to ripping to a hard drive, I am also looking into the best way to burn my reference discs. I will more than likely grab the PX880 now that I have read your post. Thanks.

 

[handmadeandroid]

Hi there, this article prompted me to join and comment! If you want to get the best from your CD collection or future purchases I recommend the following: Using any decent brand of CD drive, rip your CDs using a freeware called 'Exact Audio Copy'. This should be configured prior to ripping for the first time. There's advanced functions that could be of interest to audiophiles contained in the menus. In particular is the error checking function. As far as I can remember this checks the CD at a bit level during the ripping process to make sure that precise and accurate data is retrieved. This will slow the process down somewhat, but it can be worth it especially when extracting from old and damaged discs. Next for archiving and playback, you can compress it using 'free lossless audio codec' (FLAC). This will compress a disc to approximately half of it's original size, so about 350mb. This may seem large compared to mp3, however bare in mind a 2tb hard drive is somewhere in the region of £65 so storage shouldn't be an issue. The only caveat to this, is some portable players will not playback FLAC, however just use 'LAME' to encode to MP3 for portable devices. For regular home playback, most audio players such as winamp will handle FLAC,others may require a codec or plugin (for example WMP). To my ears at least, through a half decent sound card into my trusty old Rotel stereo amplifier, the sound quality is fantastic, with no loss of top end detail and mixing of the sound stage I get from MP3 playback.