Re: CD-Rs playing with distortion

[Jason Neely <bondibox@bellsouth.net>]

> Various people have told me different possible reasons for the distortion: maybe CD-Rs have improved over the years, and the older ones are deteriorating;

Yup, that's my #1 most likely possibility.  Dali fans would call it "persistance of memory".  Some CD players have better error correction than others, which is a reason why you get different results on different players, BUT I've heard said that errors are introduced at the time of recording, and can be corrected by the player, but a memory degradation problem can not be corrected.  There ... so I just contradicted myself.

> Brands most often recommended: Mitsui, Kodak, Taiyo Yuden,

Essentially, the brands accepted in the trading world are JAPANESE manufactured blanks, not taiwanese.  Some companies, like Fuji, have their blanks made in both countries now.  Japanese blank media can be identified by a "frosted" inner ring, as opposed to a clear inner ring.

> The easiest way to make a CD-R unusable is to
> scratch the top surface.

Wholeheartedly agree there.  Lately it has come to light that the unbranded, plain silver disks are more likely to lose this topcoat than a "clouded" silver disk which is shiny only in the places where the writing is.  The cloudy surface is applied on top of the silver topcoat and provides another protective layer.

I would recommend, first off, that you download EAC and attempt to extract the sound files with it.  I don't have a link handy, but you should set it up for secure mode.  It will let you know how many errors were found on extraction.  Ideally, this should be the most accurate way to make copies, but it all hinges on your internal CDROM being able to read the disk ...

good luck
-jas

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