If you are mastering your own CD for replication or duplication, you might need to assess whether your CD writer (drive) and your media are the best ones for audio CD mastering applications.
Let’s start with some theory and facts:
a.) The higher the burning speed, the more likely jitter will happen. The jitter are undesirable errors that can affect audio quality. Read here more about the relationships between jitters and CD burning speed.
b.) Old CD writers can write very low speed; for example 1x to 4x.
c.) Modern CD writers can write very fast (e.g) 52x however optimum writing speed (lowest jitters as possible and best recording quality) can be estimated around 4x which most mastering engineers in the industry suggest.
d.) Quality of the burn master CD is dependent on CD writing speed, quality of the media and the quality of writing software/red book CD software. Of course, the overall sound quality is dependent on the output of the mastering engineer.
Basic Requisites-your professionally mastered audio
Let’s not discuss about CD writing software (red book CD mastering software) or how does the mastering engineer do the mastering. If you are interested in this topic, you can read this tutorial on how to make a CD master that complies with red book standard.
Commercial audio CD released are different from the mix you have in your own home recording studio. In this article on characterizing a professionally mastered CD; you will know that if you extract the audio from CD, the waveforms are obviously bigger (which means louder) than a raw mix.
Therefore; it is imperative that you need to have your mix professionally mastered before you think burning it to a CD and selling it.
Selecting the best CD writer and media
Let’s see how you will be able to select the best CD writer and media for home audio mastering use.
Most professional mastering engineers agree that the best CD burner/writer for mastering is Plextor. The recommended model is Plextor PX-716A – Disk drive IDE Internal CD Writer
If you are looking for a SATA based CD burners/writers, you can have the Plextor PX-716SA DVD+\-RW Dual LayerSerial ATA Drive
As to the reason why most mastering engineers recommend Plextor it’s because of its negligible jitter rate (errors) and high quality set of CD tools that you can use to check the errors present in the CD media. It is important that the master CD you will be submitting to the replication/glass master plant should be completely error free.
There are instances that the CD submitted for duplication or replication will be rejected if the error rate is very high. This is why it’s important that you burn the CD in a writer with very low jitter.
Plextor has the set of tools that you can use to check if your CD master is error free or not. This is very convenient for you.
These drives support burning of CD master at 4x which is the industry standard for burning CD masters. So if you are using these drives; it is highly recommended that you will burn the CD audio master at a speed of 4x using Red book CD audio mastering software such as Sony CD Architect 5.2
More details about creating a CD master in this tutorial:
How to make a CD master that complies with Red Book standard.
Recommended CD Media for CD master: Again most professionals in audio industry appreciate the quality of Taiyo Yuden CD-R
These CD-R media has the lowest BLER,E-12, and E-22 errors in the CD media industry. These errors are critical if you are creating an audio CD master, it is because these errors can seriously affect the audio quality output of your CD master. Read more about these errors in this article.
The maximum rated speed of this CD-R is 52X although; you can create a CD master at a speed of 4X using Plextor drives.
It is recommended to back up your CD master so that you can reuse it easily if you need to replicate again your work. You also need to back up your original masters (high resolution WAV file in 24-bits) so that you can easily use them to re-create another CD master. You can read this tutorial on how to back up CD masters for long term.
Taking care of your drive
If you are a serious mastering engineer that will be using your CD drives to create a CD master, then you should take some steps to care for it. Some of those drives mentioned previously can be pricey and becoming rare, below are some of the common practices to protect your CD burner/writer from being easily damaged:
1.) Don’t place severely damage CD or DVD to the drive. The CD will break inside the drive while spinning and it can destroy its important components such as the laser.
2.) Don’t overheat your drive. If you are using your drive to watch movies in marathon, you need to ventilate it properly. In some countries that are very hot, the damage of overheating the drive will increase. If you are concern about this, you can have two drives installed. One drive will be solely used for audio mastering/music production purposes while other for other non-audio tasks such as gaming or watching movies.
3.) Another thing that can damage a drive is a faulty power supply unit in your PC. In my case before, frequent brown-outs without using UPS can damage the power supply unit of the PC. Using UPS and making sure your system hardware is healthy can dramatically increase the life of your drive.
Content last updated on June 20, 2012