[WinMac] Audio - RE: CD-R: The good, bad, and ugly

Dan Schwartz(expresso[at]snip.net)
Sat, 20 Feb 1999 00:22:17 -0500

        Dear Brian,

        Here is one case where I would _still_ recommend a Macintosh over anything
else: Recording CD's. Here are a few reasons why:

        1) Reliability: In an emergency, I actually used a 10 year old Mac IIci
(68030/33) to record a couple of CD's at a customer's location;

        2) Because the Mac platform has always been in a “catch-up” position (or
at least until Steve took over), it can actually master CD's in foreign
file formats better;

        3) I actually prefer to master ISO-9660 CD's on a Mac, because of virus
considerations. If the files never touch a pee-cee, then where can it come
from?! [Macro virii excepted!];

        4) For creating and “proofing” audio CD's, there is no equal to the Mac,
because of the built-in audio... Even the 15 year old Mac 128K had built-in
audio - No drivers to f**k around with - It's just “there.”

        The audio issue is something to consider on the AlphaNT platform, because
even today -- on this very AlphaNT ListSERV -- there are still questions
about how to get audio cards to work... An issue put to bed a decade ago
(in the `386 days) on the Mac platform.

        Cheers!
        Dan

At 08:30 AM 2/19/99 -0800, Brian wrote:
>> I would like to second the recommendation of RICOH drives. I have a
>> Memorex 6200S which is actually a Ricoh drive. It is 6x Read, 2x Write
>> and 2x rewrite. It has never given me any trouble. I did buy the SCSI
>> version, not the IDE. Even though I advocate UDMA IDE disks, I can't
>> recommend strongly enough to stay away from IDE CD-R and CD-RW!
>
>Not that this is Alpha related, per se, but I must also chip in my support
>for Ricoh's CD-R/RW drives, however limited the selection. I've had a Ricoh
>6200S for some time now and have yet to produce a -single- coaster after
>about 150 burns. This is with -all- variants of media, from Ricoh's own
>CD-Rs, through Memorex, TDK, 3M/Imation, Kao, Maxell, Verbatim, Hotan, CNC,
>generic, all the way down to the worst media I've ever used: Sony. It
>writes flawlessly on dark green, light green, blue, gold, silver, whatever.
>
>On the other hand, I must issue a little bit of warning about HP's newer
>unit, the 8100. Now, admittedly, I had heard numerous good reports about HP
>drives in the past, so I decided to suggest this model for our office's
>CD-R/RW needs. It's an IDE model (yuck) but it sits in a capable Pentium II
>300. It's purported to write CD-Rs at 4X, CD-RWs at 2X, and read at 24X.
>Indeed, these things do appear to happen, but writing CD-Rs at 4X produces
>more coasters than not. And the most bizarre thing about this drive: it
>doesn't write audio tracks very well--even at 2X, our most common
>setting--often, the CD is unplayable in an audio player. By contrast, the
>Ricoh has never produced an unplayable audio CD.
>
>Now, maybe this is because the HP is IDE. Or maybe it's just unhappy to be
>attached to a Pentium II (if only we had Alphas here... bah). I just feel
>that since it was so much more expensive than the Ricoh, it should have
>better lived up to its high promises. Its failure rate is not consistent
>with my experience with other HP products.
>
>- Brian Hauer
>bhauer@tsotech.com / www.tsotech.com
>Alpha: 400MHz was obsolete and retired two years ago.

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