CD-R DRIVES AND MEDIA ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL**: You just spent thousands on gear, recording & studio time, mastering and package design. Do you want your master disc to be written on a generic disc with a $29 budget CD-R drive? Of course not. Many think that any drive will do - This is not the case. Some drives are indeed better than others. Some think that because their DVD-R drive cost $400 that it will burn CD-R’s better than a dedicated CD-R drive. Also, not necessarily the case. 

You may have heard about “blurry” discs - The actual designation is called BLER or BLock Error Rate. E11, E21, E31, E22, E32... Lots of room for error. 

Audio CD’s always have a certain amount of errors on them. It’s the nature of the beast. These errors are corrected by CIRC (Cross Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code) Logic in CD drives and players. C1 errors, including E11, E21 and E31 will be found all across an audio disc. C2 errors, such as the E22, are a little more serious. The player may ignore them... It may not...

MASSIVE Mastering employs Plextor Premium drives for PMCD writing. Every disc that leaves goes through a PlexTools Professional quality check. The entire disc is read and the number of C1 and C2 errors is listed. An average number and a peak number is included in the resulting printout. 

RedBook standards (IEC 908) allow for up to 220 C1 errors averaged over a 10 second period. Most quality discs will average lower than 50 per second. MASSIVE Mastering will DISCARD ANY DISC with a BLER that ever even approaches a peak of 30 per second. While RedBook allows for 220 C1 errors per second, you can expect your PMCD from MASSIVE Mastering to average less than 3. We will also discard any disc with even a single C2 error on it. Not per second, just one C2 error and it goes into the shredder. 

Had DISC A gone out for replication, the disc would likely be rejected by the replication plant. Keep in mind that many “short run” duplicators don’t check for these errors. You owe it to yourself to make sure your project’s production master is of the highest quality, and therefore the lowest error rates available. 

Take this as a little free advice - Even if you don’t master through MASSIVE Mastering, make sure that your replication company checks for these errors before running the job! 

PlexTools Professional error detection is included in all mastering projects and RedBook transfers at MASSIVE Mastering.. 

For more information on BLER and other cool stuff, visit CD-R INFO. 

** This is in no way meant to be an endorsement of Plextor PlexWriter Premium drives in particular. I can’t help it if they’re just the best. :)