CD-R trouble

[erikd]

Hi,

Does anyone have any suggestion for a good, CD-burner? I recently bought a new A-open 48 speed burner and it absolutely SUCKS big time.  
When you have just installed it, it's basically defective (it just wrecks CD's except the 1 you get with it) until you do a firmware upgrade. Then it burns also TDK's (well, maybe 2 out of 3) but hardly anything else.  :-/
Damn thing messed up far more CD's than it burned successfully on whatever speed I try.  
I don't want super duper megazillion x speeds, I just want reliability. I also would like the ability to burn at 1x speed for best audio quality (although I don't know if this still applies for today's burners).

Erik  

[markuskidd]

Nah, it doesn't really apply these days  

Someone around here pointed me to the anandtech forums ( http://forums.anandtech.com/ ) a while back. The hot deals forum is great for finding CD-R drives and you can generally get some good information about the quality of the drive along with where to get it cheap. Don't spend more than $20 or $25! (if you're in the US, that is)

[mill]

my vote goes to Plextor.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[rgeimer]

I'll second the Plextor vote. It kicks *ss.

[oNyx]

plextor or pioneer. newer drives by em can bypass the copyprotection scheme of audio cds.

well these copyprotected audio cds arent real cds... there is a standard and they spit on it... therefore a lot of drives cant play em (intended) unfortunatelly a lot of usual cds players refuse to play em too. quite strange that u have to make a copy first in order to play em isnt it? :>

[if u r wondering. copy protection for audio cds is common in germany]

[erikd]

Thanks for the replies, folks  

Yes, I think I'll go for a plextor again. My previous one was a plextor 4-speed, but after more than 4 years it became a bit unreliable. It still works though, and probably better than the new aopen one, if only 4-speed and I wanted to get rid of my scsi interface (it made boot time take forever). After 4 years of good use I think it is allowed to start having little problems.
The 'just-link' thing to get rid of buffer underruns (which I only experienced maybe 3 times in those >4 years BTW) might work, but what good is it in the end if the damn thing throws lots of CD wrecking 'Medium speed errors' instead?  

Thanks again,
Erik

[cfmdobbie]

The last CD-RW I bought was an external Lite-On, and I can say nothing bad about it.  It's never ruined a disk, it plugged-and-played perfectly, came bundled with Nero, is USB2.0 so goes super-fast, and is a lovely metallic blue colour.  Cost me about £110, which is about $175.

I'm amazed you can pick up an internal burner for $20 in the US!  Then again, you lot also pay next to nothing for the blank disks, don't you?

[swpalmer]

In Canada a blank CD-R goes for about $0.50 CDN when bought in the right quantities (50+)  That's about $0.35 USD

Even pre-recorded audio CDs in the UK are quite expensive compared to here.  (Generally always less than $14 USD)