Which CDRW drive gives best quality audio CDs?

[Lawlaw]

I know there are standalone units but I'm not ready to shell out $600 for those. I'm a high-end audio geek and would like to get the best quality possible out of a computer drive.

I know Plextor might be the most robust drive out there but they tend to burn audio CD with a lot of jitter (a flaw in the sound...esp noticeable with high pitch sound). What are other choices?

[Guru]

At what speed and what media are you using if you get lots of "jitter" with your plextor???? I usualy tend to notice stuff like that to but the plextors I have used have worked fine so far!

[Indiana]

The same here. I didn't notice any problems with my Plextor 4/2/20 (SCSI!) burned CDs - I've not especially listened to it but I'm quite critical concerning audio-quality as well and esp. for aliasing / artifacts in the trebles (as e.g. caused by mp3 even at 160KHz).

But then maybe the key-word in the above paragraph is the magic one with the four letters?!?

I think an IDE drive with burnproof really can f*ck up an audio-CD.
Besides, the source of your audio is much more important as the CDR. Have you listened to your audio tracks after having them on HD - the best CDR can't give better results than what you have on your HD. And if you copy directly you won't even notice that it's the source drive creating the jitter. Most IDE drives had lots of difficulties in the exact audio-extraction and were really good in creating jitter until shortly. Unfortunately it seems digital/CD audio is not as "digital" as we would like it to be....

[Lawlaw]

Actually I don't have a Plextor drive. I'm now using a Yamaha ATAPI 8424 and I always burn on-the-fly with Mitsu Gold 74 min blanks (coutesy of office supply at $1.7 a piece). Source drive is a Toshiba 1402 12x DVD drive. Burn at 1x and I leave the box alone while it's burning.

I've also tried a Plextor 16x from a friend with the same setup but the sound quality is not as good as the Yamaha. I only get critical if I burn with the original CD...so the quality of MP3 and DAE is not a factor here.

[Gurm]

Hate to be one of those "well, technically speaking..." sorts of guys, but...

If you're hearing a difference between one correctly configured "good" drive and another... it's either your DAE or your media.

Bits are bits, folks.

- Gurm

[Lawlaw]

Gurm: I hate to say this and I'm not try to diss your theory. In fact I would be happy if "bits" are really "bits"...that would save me a lot of money.

In the hi-end audio world the most argued things are cable and CD players. A lot of ppl believes a CD player is a CD player and cable is cable so why spend a fortune on them? I recently upgrade my CD player to a BAT VK-D5 and it is miles ahead of my old Marantz player. I can and do hear a difference.

Back to topic: but I've only used Mitsu Gold so far...I mean...it's free stuff! So the media part has been consistant and my source drive has always been a Toshiba 1402.

[Greebe]

Jason follow my lead here... don't advise on this topic. Sometimes it's best to let them learn the hard way.

[xortam]

Lawlaw ... you may want to try the AVS forums. I know they've discussed digital jitter on DVDs. I don't burn audio CDs so I can't speak from experience.

[Gurm]

Thanks for the advice, Greebe.

Lawlaw, let me explain a couple QUICK things to you, and then I'll butt out.

CD Players - AUDIO:

This is a COMPLETELY different thing. These devices are NOT the same as a CD-ROM drive, or a CD-RW. They oversample, undersample, fudge, upmix, downmix, and do any number of whack-ass things to the bitstream in order to make it "SOUND BETTER".

Cable:

Some guy sold me "time compensating cable". I bought it, but only because it was the only nice chunky cable in the store. He told me that bass travels slower than treble. And that bass travels in the middle of the cable. So the outside of the cable is wound, to "slow down the treble", and the middle of the cable is straight, to "speed up" the bass, so they arrive at the same time.

Err... well... not only did I twist up the ends anyway (oops on THAT idea!), but he's full of crap. Even if this were true (and it can be argued), the length of the cable would need to determine the density of the wrapping of the outer cables. Suffice it to say it's garbage.

CD-RW:

These devices, UNLIKE the cd-audio players, read and write, 1-for-1, the bits on the cd. Now, the reason you might have better luck with one unit and not another might be that the DAE (digital audio extraction) of the unit is not up to par. Even the nicest, bestest audio cd players on the market only read at 1x. That's right. Not 4x, or 8x, or 12x, or even 2x. Just 1x. My Plextor rips at around 12x. Not too shabby. Newer drives ADVERTISE 32x DAE, but none have it. If you break 8x in DAE you have a nice drive. Period. Now, does your ripping program make sure you're not ripping crap? No. No, it does not. THAT is what makes your audio sound like shit. Not the burner.

---------------

Ok, now I'm gonna take Greebe's advice. You can believe in magic, or karma, or tarot, or whatever dumbass shit you like, but bits... are bits.

- Gurm

[Lawlaw]

Gurm: Thanks and appreciated for your explaination. I guess I wasn't so clear about the way things work. So even if I burn on-the-fly the source drive still does a DAE? I thought DAE only comes into play when you encode a track into MP3s.

[Gurm]

Lawlaw,

Absolutely. The source drive ALWAYS does DAE.

Burning on-the-fly makes it WORSE, since it forces the source drive to "keep up", which it often can't.

Go get a program like CD-DAE (I'm sure many people could recommend others). Not only does it determine the maximum safe DAE speed for your reader (often lower than low, I tend to use my burner to rip), it will double check the data to make sure that it reads cleanly.

- Gurm

P.S. Here's the link to CD-DAE...

http://users.glo.be/~erikd/cddae_download.htm

[Indiana]

This is what I meant: if you copy on-the-fly you won't even notice it's your source drive that can't deliver an exact audio extraction - and as said especially older ATAPI drives were great in adding lots of jitter to the actual CD source. The reason for this whole issue is because the data correction for audio CDs (in contrary to data CDs) doesn't emphasize on data integrity - it kind of tries to make errors "unhearable"...

So first copy those tracks you want on the burned CD to your harddrive and first check them for integrity (with a decent soundcard - that excludes everything have either "Live" or "Creative" in it's name....).

A good (but hard to setup) DAE extraction program is ExactAudioCopy (EAC), it at least tries to verify and make sure the captured data is the same as on the source drive - it's a bit slower for capturing but the extra time is well worth the quality here. Of course if you have a crappy drive EAC will take MUCH longer than other DAE programs, but then I'd rather dump the crappy drive than EAC.

[DentyCracker]

I you have a plextor drive, use Plextor Manager to rip. Rip from the burner. You shouldn't have to use error correction.