If you are producing a CD, this is very important information concerning the production master that you deliver to your manufacturer.
All CD plants can accept a Red Book Standard CD-R as a production master. The problem with music on CD-R has always been that it contains an enormous amount of errors. When CD plants first began accepting CD-Rs it was very difficult to cut a CD-R that would meet the CD plant's standards. That is when Sonic Solutions became the standard in mastering software, because a CD-R master burned on a Sonic Solutions system (called a 'PMCD') was absolutely as low error rate as possible.. These PMCDs were burned on a specific Sony writer at 1x speed.
Unfortunately, rather than maintaining a high standard, the CD plants lowered their standards to the point where you have to deliver an almost unplayable CD-R for it to be rejected by a plant. This is not good news, as the CD's made from high-error CD-R masters will be more unreliable for playing on car players, boom boxes etc. and will have a lower sound quality. Consequently Sonic has maintained their status as the best mastering software, as a 'native-burn' Sonic PMCD is still the lowest error Red Book Standard audio CD-R. But now we have a new problem.
It is still important that audio CD-Rs to be used as production masters be cut at lower speeds. For instance the current Sonic soundBlade mastering system as used as DES cuts at 4x speed. However, CD-R manufacturers are continually modifying their dyes to be optimized for the fastest CD burner speeds. The result of this is that the last manufacturer who made CD-Rs for lower speed burns, Taiyo Yuden, has now scaled down that facility and has discontinued those discs. Mastering rooms who have already tried the new Taiyos report having to burn 5 or more masters before getting one with acceptable error rates. Even burning at 8x results in unacceptable errors. And it has been proven that anything approaching 10x speed definitely reduces the sound quality.
But fortunately there is a solution. The DDPi, as described in our blog entry DDPi - The New Preferred Master for CD Replication, is a completely error-free master. Even though in most cases it is delivered to the CD plant on a data CD-R or DVD-R, this does not affect the quality of the DDPi. The reason is, the method in which data is written to a CD-R is completely different from the method used to burn an audio CD-R. As we said, even the best audio CD-R has a lot of errors. But data CD-Rs are written in such a way that any bad sectors on the CD-R are skipped, and after the data is written a checksum is performed, which verifies that what was written to the CD-R or DVD-R is bit-accurate to the files it came from.
So once again we are emphasizing the importance of DDPi as a production master. DES will provide our clients with info on the best CD plants to use, as not all can accept DDPi.
Again for more info on the DDPi read our entry DDPi - The New Preferred Master for CD Replication.
