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Topic: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below? (Read 18747 times) previous topic - next topic
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Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Hi there,

I have a (Hi-Fi) CD player that is fussy about the quality of the audio CD's it will play without skipping, stalling etc.  Regular, purchased music CD's play fine, just burnt CD-R's.  The manual says they should be 8X or below. 

I've just bought an LG GE24NU40, because in the specs on the website it listed 4x, 8x and 16x, etc as supported write speeds for CD-Rs.  Now I've tried it and it seems just the same as any other drive (I've now ended up with three) in that around 14-16x is as slow as it goes even if I select 8x.  I've got some special CD-Rs that are designed for slow speed burning, but it's the same.

What does everybody else do?  Should I try looking for a really old external CD drive?  Find some special software (I can't find any)?
Is there any sites where you can tweak the firmware somehow?

I know I could just listen to the music from my computer but it doesn't sound as good, plus I don't want my computer on all the time whirring away when I'm listening to music.


Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #1 –
Quote from: Pipeline79 on
The manual says they should be 8X or below.
A CD player should be able to play CDRs, no matter what speed burned with a modern drive.
Once Marantz had some drives that must been modified with a capacitor by their service and they played fine after.
If a manufacturer today directly suggests 8x burning in the manual because its drive can't handle CDR correctly he may make fun of you. They could do better.
What CD player is it with this manual?
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #2 –
A Rega Apollo.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #3 –
A few years ago, I experienced playback issues on my Marantz CD-67, when I had burnt Audio CDs at 16x speed or above, but at 8x they all played back fine.

try
https://cdburnerxp.se/
the process for making Audio CDs is pretty straight forward

if that fails to reduce your burner's writing speed

try
http://www.imgburn.com/

here's a guide for making Audio CDs with Imgburn
http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?/topic/5555-how-to-write-an-audio-cd-from-music-files-using-imgburn/

Cheers!
Maggi

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #4 –
In the german online manual is no word about CDR or burn speed.
Maybe the drive starts to wear out.
I had good success with blue Crystal Azzo Verbatims with an old car radio having problems with cheap gold CDRs.
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #5 –
Thanks Maggi.

Unfortunately I am using imgburn already, with that method.  The problem is that even if I select 8x it still writes at a higher speed.

I think it must require something beyond that.  Was hoping someone had a drive that they knew would do this.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Wombat on
In the german online manual is no word about CDR or burn speed.
Maybe the drive starts to wear out.
I had good success with blue Crystal Azzo Verbatims with an old car radio having problems with cheap gold CDRs.

It's in the manual I got with it.  :D  Page 8, OK?

Maybe it is wearing out, maybe not.  Like I said 'purchased' CD's play fine.  The higher quality ones are better, yes - it's just irritating that you can't get your drive to spin any slower now.

I'd just like to see if it makes a difference before paying to have it serviced.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #8 –
I've tried a lot of them.  But I'll give it a go right now, I've got nothing to lose.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: Wombat on
In the german online manual is no word about CDR or burn speed.
It's on page 11 in that online manual.
Quote
Im Interesse der Lesbarkeit sollen keine CDRs verwendet werden, die mit mehr als achtfacher Geschwindigkeit bespielt worden sind.
Quote
For the sake of readability, no CDRs should be used which have been recorded with more than eight times the speed.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Pipeline79 on
I've tried a lot of them.  But I'll give it a go right now, I've got nothing to lose.
What OS are you running anyways ?

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #12 –
Sorry, Wombat ... that "R" slipped on my part, but in your linked manual, they have the same sentence on page 5.

:)

Maybe they try to compensate for cheap / low quality burners in order to preventing too much support emergence ?

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #13 –
I've tried CDBurnerXP, you can choose a lower speed, but it doesn't give you a running report on the speed achieved.
I burned one at 8x and one 4x, they both took nearly exactly 4 minutes from start to finish, which makes me think they're both probably just burning at 16x or whatever.
Running Windows 7.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #14 –
hmmm ... I'll check my setup at home during the weekend and report back then.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #15 –
Quote from: Maggi on
Sorry, Wombat ... that "R" slipped on my part, but in your linked manual, they have the same sentence on page 5.

:)

Maybe they try to compensate for cheap / low quality burners in order to preventing too much support emergence ?
Not the furst time i miss something reading on my tablet...
This Rega is for sure not a cheap one but if it has problems reading media a 30$ DVD player has not i just wonder.
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!
 

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #16 –
forget it ... I just looked into the specs for your LG drive
Quote
CD-R : 16x, 32x, 40x, 48x
So it simply cannot burn below 16x...

I use the LG BH16NS40 and that can burn CD-Rs @ 8x.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #17 –
Quote from: Wombat on
This Rega is for sure not a cheap one but if it has problems reading media a 30$ DVD player has not i just wonder.
Doesn't make me wonder at all anymore ... besides that "burned-too-fast-issue", my Marantz CD-67 always had problems reading the start of track #1 of my original Delicate Sound of Thunder Disc 1, but my cheapo DVD player read it just fine.

Obviously, those "higher end" components have way better DA circuits, but since I've hooked it all up digitally, I couldn't care less.
Nowadays, I use my ~50 Euro LG BluRay player for playing back all optical medias and never had a single hickup.

:D

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #18 –
Quote from: Maggi on
forget it ... I just looked into the specs for your LG drive
Quote
CD-R : 16x, 32x, 40x, 48x
So it simply cannot burn below 16x...

I use the LG BH16NS40 and that can burn CD-Rs @ 8x.

I know, that's what's so f***ing annoying.  Does it not say here:  http://www.lg.com/us/burners-drives/lg-GE24NU40-external-dvd-drive   
4x, 8x for CD-R?

As for the CD player, I think it's well known that the more expensive a CD player is it probably makes it less stable at playing dodgy disks.
Not arguing this is justified, but it's what i've heard.  Eg, CD walkman's are better, because they're designed for the bumps of course as well.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #19 –
I can only comment this from a technological manufacturing perspective: it's difficult to tune for lower and higher speeds.

In fact most CD recorders are tuned for higher speeds, and the low speed functionality is kinda "slapped on" to meet consumer requirements of "lower is better" while in fact in practice, this is usually the opposite.

Why that Rega player would hint at "slower is better" makes no sense, and the burn quality vs. burn speed is entirely up to the recording hardware. Unless Rega keeps a list of manufacturers and "best burn speed" and other coefficients and variables for each of those, that information is really mostly just audiophoolery. The later Samsung 48X recorders were famous for having their best recording results at 48x-speeds and degraded below that. The BLER (Block error rate) got higher when recording at lower speeds).
I know this sounds counter intuitive, but if you research the entirety of the 00's decade you'd usually find results like that.

Usually recorders (and this is true for all contemporary optical media recorders, CD, DVD, BD, and for all I know probably HD-DVD, too) have one optimized recording speed, and the manual will usually state that. They used to market them as "32x, 48x, 52x" sometimes to sound more dramatic, I'd presume. To get best results, you'd simply want to record at that speed, and that's it. Computer journals and magazines used to do test and reviews of these recorders, some of them published BLER vs. recording speed. Not sure if they still do it, I haven't touched optical recording for at least 10 years.

As I understand it, it is often quite impossible for mid-ranged CD recorders to even achieve speeds lower than 8x when they're manufactured for 48x speeds, it's usually down to it being a physical hardware issue, of the motors not being able to spin smoothly at such low speeds, as well as achieve decent angular velocity synchronity. For playback, the CDs are read at higher speeds and buffered.

To be fair, I'd almost want a CD player, that rips the CD EAC-style into a buffer at high speed and then plays from memory. Just put 1GB of fast RAM into one of them, and there you go.

Also, Rega doesn't mess around: http://www.rega.co.uk/valve-isis.html, tubes, red dot-matrix LED displays, it ticks all the boxes of 70's Hi-Fi style. That's one serious CD-player if I've ever seen one. Also, this: http://www.rega.co.uk/mains-power-lead.html

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #20 –
I might be confused about the problem, but the audio CD player should be playing at 1X and it shouldn't care about the speed rating of the disc or the speed at which it was actually burned.

There was a time when you could get a "better burn" at slower speeds.   I don't know if that's still true or if burners have improved.    But with newer-faster burners, I assume the slowest speed works as well as the slowest-speed on an older, slower, burner.    It's been awhile since I've bad any "burning problems" and no longer pay much attention to the speed.

You may have a bad batch of blank discs.   You might try a different brand, or just a different batch.   

Or you may be right that the CD player is wearing-out.  The CD player in my car deteriorated and started having trouble with some burned discs, then it got to the point where most burned CDs wouldn't play, but commercial CDs were (mostly) fine.   I got it repaired and it was OK.   (Now I have an adapter for it, and I play my iPod in the car.)

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #21 –
If memory serves most drives shift to Z-CLV when burning at 16x where 8x is the max CLV writing method. Personally I always burn audio CD's at 8x CLV for other people because I don't know what kind of player(s) they have. It doesn't always work out either, the last batch of CD's I made had about a 10% failure to play in other persons' players and that might be due to the brand of blank CD-R I used (and that the blank CD-R's were purchased years ago if it matters).
"Something bothering you, Mister Spock?"

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #22 –
Quote from: DVDdoug on
I might be confused about the problem, but the audio CD player should be playing at 1X and it shouldn't care about the speed rating of the disc or the speed at which it was actually burned.
Whether it plays at 1x or at higher speeds using buffering, should make no difference. Unless the recording speed is recorded into subcode of the lead-in, which normally isn't the case, the player has no way of knowing at what speed the disc has been recorded.

I haven't seen a CD player for 20 years or so, that would not use buffering.

Quote from: DVDdoug on
There was a time when you could get a "better burn" at slower speeds.  I don't know if that's still true or if burners have improved.    But with newer-faster burners, I assume the slowest speed works as well as the slowest-speed on an older, slower, burner. It's been awhile since I've bad any "burning problems" and no longer pay much attention to the speed.
Slower burns made more sense with slower hardware in general. Buffering was complicated and there was a problem of "buffer underrun" should it take too long to send data to the recorder. These days (anything post ca. 2005) it's like I said in my previous post, where the hardware actually has a harder time recording on slower speeds than on higher speeds.

Quote from: DVDdoug on
You may have a bad batch of blank discs.  You might try a different brand, or just a different batch.   
Also, some players don't like all of the recordable CD formulations. It seems some older players don't like the Azo dye.

Quote from: DVDdoug on
Or you may be right that the CD player is wearing-out.  The CD player in my car deteriorated and started having trouble with some burned discs, then it got to the point where most burned CDs wouldn't play, but commercial CDs were (mostly) fine.  I got it repaired and it was OK.  (Now I have an adapter for it, and I play my iPod in the car.)
Them wearing out is usually down to dirt and dust. I've brought several of these back to life simply by cleaning them and especially removing grime with isopropanol from the lens assembly which is basically just floating inside a magnetic field.
Another common failure mode, is the lithium grease turning to gunk.

A manufactured CD has a physical pits, i.e. indentations in the aluminium are physical indentations. Recorded discs have a dye which basically becomes darker in places where the recording laser has been fired on, which makes it less reflective. So a recorded CD is always only an approximation of a pressed CD. The reason why older players seem to break down, is because they rely more and more on the forward error correction. While the SNR of pressed CDs and a dirty lens is usually enough with the error correction to produce a decent result, while it's usually too little to work with. When the error correction is unable to reconstruct the bits, the frame will get rejected, making a CD "skip".

Having said that, recorded CDs - some dye formulations at least - break down over time. Once they get so far gone the error correction cannot reconstruct them, they're unreadable.

I haven't used optical media beyond DVDs, so I don't know about BD dye formulations, how they hold up in players, etc.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #23 –
I can't fin any mircometrical measurements of the laser engraving deepness in the laquer vs engraving speeds.
The lower the speed is, the higher is the light power transmitted to the laquer surface, the engraving contours are better defined and deeper... resulting in less reading errors.

Re: Drive or Software for burning Audio CD's at 8X or below?

Reply #24 –
OK, that's a lot to take in.

I think it's never been very good at playing CD-r's.  I have tried cleaning discs from time to time, but I've not noticed any improvement.  Could be it was slightly faulty from when I bought it, I don't know.  I've spoken to the dealer and asked him to ask Rega what they say about this, so I can post back if I get a reply on that.
I've bought an old Teac IDE drive that writes CD's only that has the 4x and 8x CLV modes for less than £10, so if that improves things I'll post on that too.