? CD’s: Pressing vs. Burning ?

Roy Ayres · From: Riverview, Florida, USA, R.I.P.

Can anyone tell me the pro’s and con’s regarding pressed CD’s vs. burned CD’s?

chas smith R.I.P. · From: Encino, CA, USA

I wasn't aware you could press them, I thought they all had to be burned.

David Mullis · From: Rock Hill, SC

Let me see if I can splain this. A friend of mine who use to work at a CD pressing plant in Burlington, NC took me on a tour once. The CD's are actually pressed from a negative that is made of glass. the unpressed side is sprayed with a reflective material for the lazer to bounce off of. The last step of the process is where they apply a thin layer of epoxy to the pressed side of the CD. There's a machine that takes the CD, flips it over, a blob of epoxy is applied to the center of the CD then the CD spins upside down for a few seconds to distribute the epoxy evenly across the surface and spin off the excess. Make sense? They waste a lot of epoxy in the process. My friend use to take the excess epoxy from the overflow vats after it had all but hardened and make some pretty interesting scultures

David Mullis · From: Rock Hill, SC

Come to think of it, that really didn't answer your question. A couple of cons I can see as far as burne CD's, they don't play in all CD players (usually just older players) and they seem to be more susceptible to damage from heat or direct sunlight. I burned some CD's for the wife to listen to in her car. She left them laying out in the sun and they didn't work after that.

Dave Boothroyd · From: Staffordshire Moorlands

Home recorded CDRs are burned. A laser makes tiny dark dots in a layer of dye, and the playback laser does not reflect from the dark spots. A normal CD player will nearly always play a CDR. Strong sunlight will produce the same colour change and wipe everything.
A CDRW burns spots too, but the dye can be re-melted and turned back to it's original colour by a more powerful laser. Most CDRWs will not play on a standard CD player, because the colour difference between plain and burned is much less.
Commercial CDs have tiny pits pressed into the plastic substrate. The pits are exactly deep enough that the reflected light (which is all one frequency) cancels out the incident light and reads as dark because of phase cancellation. In other words they have to be accurate down to fractions of the wavelength of light. That's why you can't make them at home.
Any player will play them, and they have a long projected lifetime.
Does this help?
Cheers
Dave

Tony Prior · From: Charlotte NC

I have found that when I ask my wife to Press my CD's they melt to quick and stick to the iron..so I stick with Burning them in the fireplace..

t

Roy Ayres · From: Riverview, Florida, USA, R.I.P.

Some informative answers so far. Any more pro's and con's?

BTW Tony, I listened to some of my own playing on a CD and it was obvious that it should be burned using your technique.

Joey Ace · From: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Here's a CD vs CD-R comparision chart.

Here's an informative link about Glass Mastering.

[This message was edited by Joey Ace on 13 January 2004 at 06:18 AM.]

C Dixon · From: Duluth, GA USA

If the sampling rate and quantizing rate are identical (and I believe they are), then from a sound perspective there is NO difference between the two. Since it is digital, THIS is the basic beauty of digital.

IE, no change or noise in fidelity from input to output as long as the above rates are identical. This is why digital communications such as LD calls makes phone calls from Sydney to NY sound like they are next door, rather than the old days of analog being fraught with all kinds of sound anamolies.

However, as far as melting or one type being susceptible to the CD being ruined as opposed to another type, then that is a horse (er CD

) of a different color.

carl

Chris DeBarge · From: Boston, Mass

If it's just a few (for friends, gigs or demos), then burning them at home is fine. But if it's a "real" release, you gotta get them pressed. All the reasons are listed about, most notably the ability to play them in every CD player, and durability.

Brad Sarno · From: St. Louis, MO USA

Theoretically a burned CD should sound identical to a pressed CD and one copy should be the same as the next, but there are other factors. Not all CD's sound alike. I do audio mastering for a living and I'm faced all the time with this issue. People will have their CD's pressed at a budget duplcation service and the disks they get back sound worse, sometimes much worse, than the master I provided. The main issue is usually jitter. Just because the pits are etched into a disk or are burned into the dye with the proper data, it doesn't insure that those pits are placed exactly in time. This timing issue is called jitter. A disk that is burned too fast, though all of the data integrity is there, may not play well thru a CD player. With 44,100 samples per second and each sample containing 16 ones or zeroes, if the timing or placement of the info isn't perfectly clocked, the stream gets blurred. The sonic effects of jitter can range from cloudy and veiled to harsh and edgy. Also a CD burned too fast can have errors or poorly written info. When a Cd player sees an error, sometimes it will do oversampling to re-read and/or interpolate the data. This DSP processing in a CD player can also add noise and jitter to the data and audio stream adversely affecting the sound quality. It's a world full of voodoo and mojo. I wish it were as simple as ones and zeroes.

The general trick is to use good media (Taiyo Yuden or Mitsui) in a good burner at slow speeds, like 1x, 2x or 4x for critical stuff.

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Brad Sarno
Blue Jade Audio Mastering
St. Louis http://home.earthlink.net/~bradsarno/

[This message was edited by Brad Sarno on 13 January 2004 at 08:51 AM.]

Nicholas Dedring · From: Beacon, New York, USA

Well, for one thing you can burn a CDR anytime you need them, at an identical marginal cost, one at a time for the same price (probably about $0.25 per disc for the blank media). Unless things have changed, you need a run of $500 discs at a place that does the pressing (you definitely can't do it yourself unless you own a pressing plant), at $10 a piece, if I remember right.

The one thing (aside from heat sensitivity/sun sensitivity) is that I find that a pressed, "official" CD will put up with a bit more scratching and physical abuse and continue working. A CDR takes less physical damage to stop working... then again, I also handle my CDRs with less courtesy, because I can make another one (I only do it with music I own for my own use, just based on conviction.)

Larry Bell · From: Englewood, Florida

Nick,
What were you convicted of???

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Larry Bell - email: larry@larrybell.org - gigs - Home Page
2003 Fessenden S/D-12 8x8, 1969 Emmons S-12 6x6, 1971 Dobro, Standel and Peavey Amps

Dave Boothroyd · From: Staffordshire Moorlands

Brad is correct, if a pressed CD and a burned CDR have been recorded perfectly, and are read with equal accuracy, they will sound identical.
Sample rate is the same, bit depth is the same.
What you don't know when you play a bad CD is how much of what you hear is the actual sound and how much is being reconstructed by the error correction programme in the player.
Typical symptoms of an overstretched error correction are:-
Twittery distortion of high frequencies.
Vagueness in the stereo image.
Graininess in the quiet sounds- especially fadeouts.
And if it's really bad, short silences - that is when the machine is completely unable to guess what it's supposed to be playing.
There are likely to be more errors with a CDR, and more errors on a fast-burned one than a slow one- though a bad pressing plant can produce some real stinkers too!
Just to make it more confusing, some CDs have all sorts of security coding to prevent copying, and this can cause trouble too.
Cheers
Dave

Herb Steiner · From: Briarcliff TX 78669, pop. 2,064

The quality and mechanical issues are of course important, but for many of us who create CD's, the main factor is economics.

The CD duplicators I use require a minimum of 500 units to press CD's. In the steel guitar world, very few of us sell 500 of any one item; if it's course material, or rhythm tracks we're talking about, it's safer and cheaper to have CD's burned 100 at a time.

If the market was larger, pressed CD's would be de riguer, but as it stands for many of us in the marginal market, it pretty much has to be burned CD's.

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Herb's Steel Guitar Pages
Texas Steel Guitar Association

Roy Ayres · From: Riverview, Florida, USA, R.I.P.

Wow. You guys have overwhelmed me with information -- all of it good. I will study the various factors and make a decision of which way is the best for my particular situation. Considering the cost of the studio and musicians, I didn't want to go into this thing blind, and you guys have opened my eyes.

Thanks a bunch

Roy

chas smith R.I.P. · From: Encino, CA, USA

Roy, I can talk about my pespective on putting out cd's of my music. Quite simply, the kind of music I write doesn't have a very large audience, in fact, in my world, if I sold 5000 copies, that would be a "gold record". 300 to 1000 is about all I can hope for and I have international distribution on a good label, I get good reviews and I'm making the top 10 lists in my field.

So, for me, it's not about making money, it's more about legacy and how I want to present myself (I don't write love letters on paper towels). That being said I had mine professionally mastered, which is moderately expensive, and hired professional artists for the artwork. I'm not suggesting that you blow your retirement on a cd, but I think you want to put out the best you can do. When you/I think of our connections to the musicians who are deceased or we've never met, it's through their recorded media that we come to know them.

Jack Dougherty · From: Spring Hill, Florida, USA

Roy..

If you go to "Oasiscd.com" And I think thats correct.They are in the printing business.
They would have the answer your looking for.

[This message was edited by Jack Dougherty on 15 January 2004 at 05:16 PM.]

Dr. Hugh Jeffreys · From: Southaven, MS, USA

Roy - I have 3 CD-R burners and have sold several thousands of my album in the last 2 years---with no come--backs. I found the optimal creation speed to be 4x. By the way, have your master done in MONO: Radio/TV stations don't deal with stereo. My album gets a good bit of air play on University Jazz stations, which would not be possible with stereo. If speeds greater than 4x are utilized, you might get buffer underruns, as well as sacrifice quality. Hugh

John Macy · From: Rockport TX/Denver CO

If you want to service TV or AM radio, you can provide them with a tighter stereo or even mono mix (most university jazz staions I hear are FM stereo). However, as a consumer, I would be bummed to have to buy the mono version....

[This message was edited by John Macy on 17 January 2004 at 11:56 AM.]

chas smith R.I.P. · From: Encino, CA, USA

most of my favorite music (1920's - 1950's) was recorded in mono...

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