Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler CD Ink Question

I'm full of questions today...

Anyway, I've just noticed that my player seems to be having trouble playing some CDRs. Initially I though maybe the lens was dirty (thus my earlier post), but it seems that any CDR that has a coloured ink (blue in this case) makes a kind of squeeling noise if you put your ear to the transport while it is read and played. For clarification, there is no sqeeling noise from the speakers. Some actually stop playing after about 10 seconds; this is preceeded by static / noise from the speakers in addition to the transport noise.

With CDRs that have transparent ink, there is no noise and they play fine.

Anyone know what the differences are with the way these coloured inks are seen by the player (is there an advantage between colours???), and has anyone else had similar experiences?

My cheaper DVD player can play thses just fine...

Thanks for the insights.

Do you mean the "wax" (actually a cyanine/azo dye) layer? The layer the data is contained on?

Some players and recorders have issues with some colours of dyes (and assumably - some colours of reflective layers) - my lead programmer had issues burning on anything but azo (dark blue) dye blanks with gold reflective layers. The burner (at the time, I think a 4x2x2x LaCie CD-RW) wouldn't recognize cyanine or pterocyanine (? the green discs made by/for Kodak)blanks at all.

Also check what speed the disc was burned at. Just because your CD-R can burn at 52x times for data, doesn't mean a disc burned at max speed (usually around 23x for an IDE burner) will be easily playable in a CD player... as burn speed increases, so do inconsistancies. Anything going to master here gets burned at 1x, if it's going to audio premaster, it's usually burned at 4x and even data discs usually get throttled back to 8x just to be safe. Easier to take 10 mins more to burn a CD than to pay to resend something unreadable at the other end.

Bren R.

Thanks BenR. That's what I was referring to. Not sure what speed these were burned at as it was quite a while ago and have worked on many cheaper players since then.

Yet, a Denon (I believe it was a 1910) and now this CA Azur 640C have problems with them. Seems odd that the cheaper mass market DVD players can play these with ease whereas pricier units cannot...

I had a client who was a vocalist, gave her a copy of a few tracks with her vocal track excluded (she had a small get together thing she was to sing at, without the band, was just going to do it karaoke style)... she had her little brother make a few copies (at "default" settings in Roxio's Ee-Zee CeeDee Copier or whatever was bundled), just in case she left it behind somewhere... got to the little impromptu gig, and it wouldn't play.

We tried the discs in a multitude of different players, just for sh*ts and giggles... it would play flawlessly in her Panasonic DVD player, in one of my two Toshiba DVD-Ps (I think the SD-1800 but not the SD-3860?), it played with distortion in my HK carousel and Alpine car unit, and results were nearly random on computer CD-ROMs, using both "analog" and "digital/data playback" modes and not at all in a few boombox type players and one of my DVD-Ps.

Another issue I find often is that Nero and other burning software turns CD-Text on by default which may be part of the problem with some players or at least a minor annoyance if you haven't actually entered any info for the CD-Text.

Bren R.