Do you have any thoughts on external burners?

 

AA

 

This is what I do.

 

the Hi-fi CD burner is the best way to burn Audio CDr. It has never failed me and my Cd-r are read everywhere flawlessly (well the car, not always, but it f**ks up also on regular Cds, too), which is simply not the case of multi-speed computer-burned CDrs

 

Slow, maybe and you must be staying close to it to watch out for it! The manual  (no other trustworthy manner)  incrementing of the tracks implies you must be around. If you get the 80 mins Cdr, you can easily squeeze two vinyls, but tyhere are some notable exceptions.

 

MikeEnRegalia wrote: ... some will just want to cut it into single tracks, others will want to normalize it or de-noise it (which I wouldn't recommend, as it degrades the signal).

 

Some old recordings of very poor quality can get better with using noise/hiss filters, like old audience recordings & bootlegs.

 

krusty wrote: CoolEdit has a whole bunch of tools to remove hiss, crackles and hum. The end result IMO is like listening to the vinyl source.

 

But I would recommend to use these tools when they are absolutely neccesary, the CoolEdit hiss removal may make the sound mechanical, at least I have experienced this.

 

personally I will never use those RCA (red and white) cables anymore. They are awful. Other special cable may appear horrendously expensive but they do the job just fine. Problem is that my turntable (a very average Phillips) has those unremovable RCA cables .

 

 

 

As far as Hi FI CD burners, I have heard many horrible things about those multi-trays Cds recorders.

 

Best to use a unit containing the burner alone and using your normal Cd player as source.

 

the one Olivier shows is probably fairly expensive, but I use the Phillips (most likely a quarter of the expensive Denon prices) entry model and it seems to have exactly the same features and controls as the Denon. Although displayed differently, the controls are exactly the same and the display is also.

 

The inside of the machine is always the same, all there can be surrounding gadgets changing the prices.  like multi-trays etc...

 

 

Sean Trane wrote:   personally I will never use those RCA (red and white) cables anymore. They are awful. Other special cable may appear horrendously expensive but they do the job just fine. Problem is that my turntable (a very average Phillips) has those unremovable RCA cables .

 

Do you hear them reducing the audio quality? I'm a bit deaf, so I'm not very sensitive to sound quality. I believe there are also RCA cables of different quality, some seem to have stronger heads as others. What other cable types could be used to transfer data from an amplifier to a computer? 

 

I was seriously doubting it would make a big difference at first, so the store manager let me take the unidirectional cables (careful how you connect them) home for a try out without paying. Next morning I was waiting ten minutes before opening hour of his shop to pay him and buy two more pairs. This is also very necessary for speakers. >>> noticeable difference, but if you are not sensible from the ears, then this might be superfluous investment

 

then the shop owner started telling me about the first weeks of pushing the cables to their limits in order to get full capacity of their performance. I think this is pushing it a little, though.

 

Wires are not cars

 

Mike,

 

I can see where your poiunt is coming from and I would still agree with you, as this running-in is a bit pushing things to far for a stereo application

 

 

 

In my line of research, we go through ageing of materials (in NDT but also in destructive testing) and search their propency to keep their original properties (including resistivity, magnetic, embrittlement , microfracture propagation etc...) but we only do this for steels (ferritic , austenitic, martensitic stainless steels) and I can garantee you that the ageing (or running in) is definitely very important for proper operations at their nominal properties. But we are doing this in the framework of extreme conditions (Furnaces and power plants) and only on Iron-derivatives

 

(Olivier is fully right speaking of weld and I passed my safety consultant thesis on weld, so I know a thing or two about it and the preheat and cooling down are extremely important )

 

 

 

Why I say this solution of wire running-in being a bit pushed is that the wires operate at room temperatures and the heat generated from the operation of the stereo is rather negligeable (if the wires are not kept in bundles or coils in order to keep the stereo installation presentable. This attaching the cable is also stupid because it creates a capacitance effect which will ruin the good performance of the cable), and the cables are designed to generally work at 30% capacity of their full ability.

 

Where the real problem could happen and losses generated (and therefore heat generated) are at the connection points: the platted gold connectors are there to reduce the loss and thermal bridge effects.

 

 

 

 

This ofcourse is not a very important aspect in hard-core HiFism, I believe!

 

Do your normal Cdr play almost anywhere and without any skipping or glitches (usually staring in the last third of the recorded album?

 

I have found that computer burned Cds screw up very often, mostly because of the multi-speed.

 

Just like multi-speed cassette recording , the quality was pisspoor

 

 

 

 

I suppose that your burning from vinyls can only be done in real time

 

I think Mike just scored a point here, Olivier

 

 

 

Mike, Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have the distintctive impression you listen to your music mainly on your computer! do you ever play your cd in a Hi-Fi stereo?

 

 I mean the ones where the witdth of the components are 45 cm?

 

 

Sorry if I assume wrong....

 

 

1) I have a simple stereo system (Onkyo components, Advent speakers, and an old Phillips turntable) in one room.

 

2) I have a computer and CD burner in another, non-adjacent room so the computer and stereo cannot be connected.

 

3) Is there a reliable and respectable quality way to record from the stereo system onto CD-r? Are there good stand-alone burners that could be connected to the stereo? Even if so, do I need special cables to make that connection, or are the nice cables merely for playback?

 

4) Am I missing some very obvious, important principles in this process?

 

Many thanks again, everyone.

Captain Beyond,

 

There is an entry stand alone stereo CD burner from Phillips going for some 250.00 €, but it is not the hi-fi format (more like the midi format - around 35 cm-wide) , and I have two friends who have this model and think it is perfect. it has optical link capacity, digtal dual input and analog dual input.

 

 

If you value your stereo system (you seem to have the same weak link of the stereo chain as I do >>> an average turtable, but the rest sound fine), this Stand alone Phillips unit is hardly a huge investment and will allow you to copy Cds, CD-rs CD-RW copy vinyls or even cassettes or live recordings (I think) directly.

 

Thanks for the good word. Ah, I think what you recommend might be more my speed, at this point. DO you know the model number? Also, what will be the major shortcomings of it not being the hi-fi format?

 

Thanks Again 

 

It hasn't been a problem to date because my car is old and has a cassette deck in it. I have a very nice cassette recorder hooked to my stereo and use that to make tapes for driving. I am in the market for a new car and getting a tape deck in it is not an option, I will have to go to CD. I will not carry the expense to buy CD's of my favourite music, not when I have perfectly good vinyl LP's.

 

Thanks captain for asking the question.

 

My friend's stereo burner is a phillips entry model, I'll phone them up to see what the model number it is

 

 

It is exactly the same inside machine  as the more expensive ones except for the options, and I'm pretty sure they only fit it in a smaller . So in the case of this small stereo burner, my educated guess is that only the size of the element makes the difference, in case the users have MiDi stereo and want to have the burner MiDi in a rack.

 

MiDi is for mid-dimension instead odf mini-stereo chain and micro-stereo chains

 

My reasonning on this is that they would simply never design a machine fom scratch to put it only on a basic model.>>>just not worth it

 

Same with Cd players >>> the mechanics and the lazer is usually the same for many different brands ( Phillips - and maybe Sony - have it manufactured for all of the other brands since they own the patent) >>> same thing with burners . so all of the other brands have the same two or three model that exist >>> they just buy them and pay the inventors the rights.

 

 

the output of your CD player is a lot more important and since you use the digital output cables (or the fibre optics) , the converter does not interact . It only does in case of vinyls , which I agree is important too in this particular thread since it is about vinyls

 

 

 

The standalone stereo from Phillips model I was speaking of is called CDR570

 

 

 

 

 

 

you posted this Denon model which has no reader Olivier, only the recorder!!! Check it out for yourself, there is no tray for the reading part. The Phillips I a talking about  comes (as with this one above most likely too)  with three possibilities on the back panel:

Analog input (to which of course there is a digitalyser) >> for vinyls, cassettes and others sources (Reel To Reel or live recordings)

 

Digital input (to which you connect your Cd player (you would be dumb to connect it isthe analog input and take the risk of redigitalising digital)

 

optical input (for this, you must hace an external deck equipped for this )

 

 

 

 

..and if you don't do this the elves will let the dragons into your vinyl store

 

Quite right.  Some of the "on-board" pc soundcards are pretty poor and you will hear the degradation when you record stuff.  There are some good USB cards about which are great for laptops which often have no audio line-in socket.  The other advantage of USB is that you don't need to take the computer to bits.

 

I would always advise burning the CD as slow as you have time to do.  It's just logic really; the faster you burn the disc the less time the laser has on each pit and the less accurate it is.  Therefore the error rate is higher and the player has to work harder to read the disc.  Of course higher quality discs and writers will give better results.

 

I believe that if the CD-R's are OK, and the computer systems and hardware are working fine, there's no trouble with higher speeds. It's ofcourse wise to not have too many processes running at same time on your computer. But I say, stress the iron and find the maximum capacity of your systems!  If there are errors occuring at the burning process or there's errors in the final dics, reduce the speed then.

 

I have internal Plextor DVD-RW drive, I write my dics with 48xspeed and the disc are OK. I use wav files for audio sourcews, so they are just 0's and 1's placed on the disc on intended order.

 

About the full moon, it was very pretty yesternight!  Managed to sleep weel though.