CDR alert
Pete Coe
At a recent festival, Steafan Hannigan & myself visited the CD sales
stall to follow up comments we'd both heard about some of the products
on offer. We discovered that certain recordings on sale, at top price,
were CDRs not CDs. A couple of days later I visited a shop which again
had CDRs for sale. Now in both cases the retailers are reputable & were
shocked to discover that what they had purchased in good faith as CDs
were not CDs at all. It's not always easy to tell the difference,
visually, between a CD & a CDR. CDRs often have a green bloom on the
underside & if you examine the playing surface you can see the line
between recorded & blank sections. You often find out if your player is
reluctant to play the CDR in the first place or if the quality of
reproduction isn't as good as it should be or finally, you've left it in
the sun, it's gone black & the music's disappeared. I would guess that
the artists involved aren't too happy about having their early
recordings re-released on this format, even if they know & whether they
can do anything about it is doubtful. All the recordings Steafan & I
found, being sold as CDs, but which turned out to be CDRs, are being
produced, in house , re-released , distributed & sold by mail order by
Celtic Music of Harrogate. Let's make this absolutely clear. Not every
Celtic Music product was a CDR, there were some proper CDs amongst them,
but we were shocked to discover how many early recordings of well-known
artists are being re-released on CDR by this company.
So, it might be as well to check that what you are selling or buying is
what you think it is & if you find that the recordings you have been
supplied with or purchased in good faith, are of poor quality, then
maybe you should return them whence they came & ask for your money to be
refunded.
--
Pete Coe
http://www.backshift.demon.co.uk/petehome.htm
http://www.ryburn3step.org.uk
David Harris
Pete (and other who may have an interest),
Whilst I am not prepared to support anything illegal, or even slightly iffy,
concerning CDRs, I ran a very small recording studio for three years which
successfully produced low volume (usually 50-100 off at a time) audio CDs
using home burned CDRs.
I have never had a complaint or a single CD returned through the inability
of the buyers CD player to play the disc (none that I can remember anyway
!). I always used good quality, branded, CDR blanks, which were burned on a
Plextor CD Writer at 2x speed.
When we first started doing this, we printed a small warning on the centre
of the CD label, which we then stuck on the inside of the CD tray, basically
saying "its home-made - call this number if you have any problems" ....
no-one ever called. After some time, we stopped this practise as we felt it
was a waste of resources. We also made it perfectly clear to any buyers what
they were buying (and yes, this included folk who then sold the product
on...). So, everyone knew what we were doing and no-one minded. We paid the
MCPS/PRS fees as appropriate too. The studio closed at the beginning of
April this year due to my disability.
I wanted to mention this at this point because we are about to try and get
some permissions from EMI/MCPS/PRS et al to undertake a private small
release of some early Jake Thackray material. I am part of the Jake E Groups
at Yahoo and Topica. We have over 40 members and at the moment the only
material of Jakes available is the EMI CD "Lah Di Dah".
So - my point - if anyone sees any messages in the near future about Jake
Thackray CDRs, you know what is going on.
Thanks for your timely post Pete, sorry to slightly hijack it.
Best Regards,
David Harris
(G8INA Studios, now closed)
Nigel McKenzie
>> reluctant to play the CDR in the first place or if the quality of
>> reproduction isn't as good as it should be or finally, you've left it in
>> the sun, it's gone black & the music's disappeared.
Actually CDR's are proving to be considerably more durable than people
predicted and the reproduction quality is exactly the same as a normal
CD.
In fact the masters for almost all CD's, are sent to the pressing plants
on a CDR.
Is the problem that you feel cheated, because the record label has not
had to pay up for a CD run (minimum cost about £1000)?
For very low volume releases, I don't have a problem with CDR's. However
if you want an album to be reviewed and get radio plays, it will only be
taken seriously it has to be a CD.
--
Nigel McKenzie
Pete Coe
>predicted and the reproduction quality is exactly the same as a normal
>CD.
Not the ones I've got & the artists I talked too don't agree with you
either.
>In fact the masters for almost all CD's, are sent to the pressing
>plants on a CDR.
Well mine weren't. But we're not talking about masters, we're talking
about CDRs of dubious quality, produced in house & not registered with
MCPS/PRS.
>Is the problem that you feel cheated, because the record label has not
>had to pay up for a CD run (minimum cost about £1000)?
I paid kdg, a very reputable CD manufacturer, £458.38 for 500
>For very low volume releases, I don't have a problem with CDR's.
>However if you want an album to be reviewed and get radio plays, it
>will only be taken seriously it has to be a CD.
So, if the record company wants to be taken seriously...? I'm sure the
artists would like to be taken seriously too.
David Kilpatrick
Nigel McKenzie wrote:
To clarify, there are CD-Rs and CD-Rs! You can burn a blue dye CD-R in a
24X recorder using iTunes or MusicMatch and it will not be a 'real' CD
in any sense - the signal level will be roughly 6dB below a 'pressed' CD
(typically, you need volume 25 or so on a digital CD player to match the
volume you normally hear at level 20). There will be no lead-in
information, no gaps between tracks, no barcode linked numbering, no
serial copy protection, no copyright and production information embedded
- no Red Book standards adhered to. The blue dye will fail to play on
many old CD players, and will produce a flat sound lacking dynamic range
(high end presence) on some fairly modern ones. Yes, it's digital, and
we know this can NOT happen... but it does. Maybe someone else can
explain why.
On the other hand, you can master AIFF files with careful normalization
and use JAM to add all the correct Red Book information, and burn a
silver back CD-R using a 4X speed writer with additional gain to match
as closely as possible pressed glass master Cd performance. Such a CD-R
is what's normally used FOR glass mastering these days, often enough;
the CD pressing plant simply rips the entire disc image, adds a further
3dB global gain, and makes the master - as long as you have all your
track levels correct, all your pause gaps etc programmed fully.
I am just testing the Epson 950 inkjet printer for our photographic
magazine MASTER DIGITAL. It prints on azo-printable CD-R blanks. The
resulting product is actually far more impressive than a silkscreened
pressed CD, with full photographic quality and a lovely metallic pearl
sheen to the colours. Any buyer would say 'what a superb looking CD'. Of
the three Cd-R blank makes for printing which I have tested, only one is
silver - the other two are pale cyan dye, which is OK in about 99 per
cent of players and shows a very slight loss of sound quality. I've been
writing at 12X speed and so far had no playback losses.
If you use a 74 minute CD-R blank and restrict yourself to one hour of
music, you are almost certain to get a perfect playback when recording
at 12X with modern systems. If you try to use the entire CD-R available
time, you may get jumping or data loss with many older CD players in the
last few tracks; this is what the Lowden internet guitar group did,
crammed a CD-R totally full, and my copy has five tracks which can't be
played on most CD players. Two tracks defy playing on anything, even the
latest computer drives.
So - CD-R writing is not 'one product'. It covers a whole gamut from 20p
blanks with deep coloured blue dye and a high error rate, written
without access to proper mastering software... to totally professional
mass production with excellent colour label printing, on top quality 25p
blanks (the difference is that little!) with silver dye, high volume
levels, crisp sound and pretty much everything you get from a pressed CD.
It costs roughly £1 to produce a good CD-R: allow 30p for the blank, 10p
for the jewel case, and 60p for double-sided inkjet paper and the inks
necessary to print a four-page front insert, single sheet rear, and the
disc. To this, add 7 minutes per disc for 12X writing including disc
handling, and roughly the same time per disc for the printing, trimming
and finishing - 15 minutes actual work for each finished disc, based on
home computer systems. The software costs roughly £200 and the Epson
printer with CD carriage is £350. I value 15 minutes of my time at
roughly £15 (hey, this reply is worth thirty quid...) but like most
inefficient business owners I happily work for about £5 for the same
period. So, minimum real cost per CD-R about £6.
For £700-800 + VAT I can get 1,000 top quality glass mastered CDs made,
complete with jewel cases, 4 back 1 4 page front insert, 4 back 0 rear
insert, and three spot colours on the CD itself (4 colour process is not
very advisable on the disc, and if anything, sticking to 2 colours -
white plus print - is sensible). Real cost per CD about £1 or less, so
by the time I need more than say 150 units, they might as well be glass
mastered and pressed properly - and I'll have 850 extra CDs into the
bargain.
Hope this info helps a few of you out there understand why acts who have
real CDs will sometimes thrust one at club organisers, or the raffle,
free of charge... or send one to your local papers and radio stations on
request... while those with home-cut CD-Rs will be keen to get some back
for their considerable investment in personal time for EVERY last one!
David
Paul Burke
> To clarify, there are CD-Rs and CD-Rs! You can burn a blue dye CD-R in a
> 24X recorder using iTunes or MusicMatch and it will not be a 'real' CD
> in any sense - the signal level will be roughly 6dB below a 'pressed' CD
> (typically, you need volume 25 or so on a digital CD player to match the
> volume you normally hear at level 20). There will be no lead-in
> information, no gaps between tracks, no barcode linked numbering, no
> serial copy protection, no copyright and production information embedded
> - no Red Book standards adhered to. The blue dye will fail to play on
> many old CD players, and will produce a flat sound lacking dynamic range
> (high end presence) on some fairly modern ones. Yes, it's digital, and
> we know this can NOT happen... but it does. Maybe someone else can
> explain why.
>
I suspect that CDRs recorded in this way have undergone a conversion
digital->audio->digital in the copying chain. If you copy a digital
signal byte-for-byte, there's no reason for it to sound different from
the original, though differences in standards (pit size, light frequency
used) may well result in a CD that older players can't cope with.
Paul Burke
AMS
news:3D12DD81...@scazon.com...
> > [snip] The blue dye will fail to play on
> > many old CD players, and will produce a flat sound lacking dynamic range
> > (high end presence) on some fairly modern ones. Yes, it's digital, and
> > we know this can NOT happen... but it does. Maybe someone else can
> > explain why.
> >
>
> I suspect that CDRs recorded in this way have undergone a conversion
> digital->audio->digital in the copying chain. If you copy a digital
> signal byte-for-byte, there's no reason for it to sound different from
> the original, though differences in standards (pit size, light frequency
> used) may well result in a CD that older players can't cope with.
The lack of top end response might be due to the error correction scheme in
the CD-DA Solomon-Reed encoding to kicking in because the CD is almost
unplayable. The error correction scheme causes the quality of a damaged/poor
quality CD to degrade fairly gracefully, but losing the transients/top end
first as interpolation cuts in.
Another issue with playback reliability is to do with the dyes used on CDRs.
Certain players will work better with either blue or green dyes depending on
the laser technology used. This doesn't seem to be a problem with pressed
silver discs as the underling technology is different (i.e. pits rather than
'lenses').
Anyway I think the issue is not the underlying long term reliability of CDRs
(which is still being determined) but the 'passing off' of CDRs as
commercially pressed CD-DA product. If the product had been labelled
prominently as CDR then 'caveat emptor' (buyer beware!) would apply.
Brian Heywood
--
Real World Computing Contributing Editor - Multimedia/Audio
David Kilpatrick
Paul Burke wrote:
The glass mastering process includes a gain between 3dB and 6dB overall, that's all.
A pressing from a glass master plays louder than a CD-R.
It may be for the above reasons you suggest - pit size etc - and yes, if
you rip the digital data from a CD or a Cd-R you should get identical
data. Just take it from me, they do play differently, and it's pretty
difficult to get a CD-R to match the volume of a CD on regular players.
Not impossible. Mine are now fine! Buy my first attempts were not, and I
can say the same for dozens of CD-R albums I have heard from others.
David
Pete Coe
the call of duty. Somehow I think they might be missing a moral point
here. I spoke to one of the artists, who's re-release is on a Celtic
Music CDR, just last night. 'The sound quality's crap' was the comment.
I think that's all the technical information we need to know. This
particular CDR was on sale at £14, it's not registered with MCPS/PRS &,
no, they haven't had any royalties yet.
George Hawes
Pete Coe <pet...@backshift.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Paul Burke & David Kilpatrick have given technical information beyond
> the call of duty. Somehow I think they might be missing a moral point
> here.
And an aestheic one, it seems . .
> I spoke to one of the artists, who's re-release is on a Celtic
> Music CDR, just last night. 'The sound quality's crap' was the comment.
> I think that's all the technical information we need to know. This
> particular CDR was on sale at £14,
Has Bulmer hit hard times, or is it merely "Business" - sorry - "Extortion
as usual"?
> it's not registered with MCPS/PRS
Is THAT legal??
G.
--
George Hawes (george...@orange.net)
and Sawston Arts Festival
Andy Jackson
between a glass mastered and a good quality CDR lets get to a more important
problem.
Now the technology is available for anyone to produce their own CDs there is
indeed a lot of crap on the market.
I was particulary annoyed to purchase a home produced CD recorded so
adly - i.e. the microphone at the far end of the room -that is unlistenable
to. This was on sale by a respected and long standing member of the folk
scene. No need for names sufficient to say I will check very carefully
before I buy from this artist again.
The bottom line is that you cannot replace good listening ears and just
because the technology makes it possible, it
does not make it easy, the old skills are still necessary.
The CDR technology has improved so much in the last few years that I don't
believe this is now an issue, what is important is the quality of the
rcording !!
David Kilpatrick
Andy Jackson wrote:
> The CDR technology has improved so much in the last few years that I don't
> believe this is now an issue, what is important is the quality of the
> rcording !!
>
I've just made a dozen CD-Rs this afternoon on blue azo dye blanks and they play
perfectly in a player which can be very muffled with some
similar-looking disks, so yes, the quality does seem to be improving all
the time.
But... the fact is that TAPES have been crap for years. Being able to
make a truly lousy home/live/semipro recording is nothing new! People
used to make very plausibly packaged and labelled tapes which were dreadful.
And there is nothing to stop any artist from having a full scale
pressing of a poor recording either - and some are better designers and
writers than they are judges of sound quality too, so they can make a
great looking tape or CD. Or they buy services or have friends with the
right skills.
If anything I think digital recording and CD-R writing are improving the
standards of such recordings - people with no ear for sound levels, or
EQ, can study the WAV file visually and make many corrections
(normalisation, EQ, reverb, denoising, dehumming, click removal and
editing to remove bum notes). Also, it is much easier now to rescue poor
recordings and rework them into something listenable-to.
David
madfiddler (Mark Knight)
<pet...@backshift.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>Actually CDR's are proving to be considerably more durable than people
>>predicted and the reproduction quality is exactly the same as a normal
>>CD.
>
>Not the ones I've got & the artists I talked too don't agree with you
>either.
I don't condone this at all :( But, just to argue the above point, HHB
sell CDR's which they say have a "shelf life" of above 200 years,
according to an item in this months Sound on Sound
The old ones, and in fact the early CD's didn't. I have some old Jarre
CD's which lasted less than 5 years before they failed... and that's a
commercial CD. Apparently the the original dye would eat into the CD
plastic, and killl it.
madfiddling Mark.
Paul Burke
>
> Paul Burke & David Kilpatrick have given technical information beyond
> the call of duty. Somehow I think they might be missing a moral point
> here. I spoke to one of the artists, who's re-release is on a Celtic
> Music CDR, just last night. 'The sound quality's crap' was the comment.
> I think that's all the technical information we need to know. This
> particular CDR was on sale at £14, it's not registered with MCPS/PRS &,
> no, they haven't had any royalties yet.
> --
Presumably the moral point is to do with the illegal copying of CDs. I
don't miss that point at all. The technical point is that a bad copy is
bad whether it's on a CDR or a kosher pressed CD, and there is NO
technical reason why a CDR should be in any way different from any other
digital transmission medium. Bytes are bytes are bytes, if they are all
there, the copy is absolutely identical, whether on CD, CDR, hard disk,
or punched paper tape (yes, I am old enough to have used that).
Or are you trying to say that a good illegal copy is less morally
repugnant than a bad one?
I've had crap sound quality on all media, analogue and digital. That is
simply down to the skill (or absence thereof) of the recording
technicians. If the release is legal, and there is no control over
issues of recordings in the contract, thet is tough on the band. If it
is illegal, they have reciurse to law (if they can afford it).
Paul Burke
Nick Jones
important point...
I'm sick of the number of times I get a CD where the beginning of nearly
every track is clipped as a result the engineer using DAT auto IDs as CD
track markers. This will never work as the marker will always be positioned
too late to be of any use as a CD track marker. Please note that DAT auto ID
is NOT a professional feature of the DAT spec., as DAT was never intended as
a professional format but as a replacement for cassettes, in fact DAT is a
failed domestic format that has been tarted up for pro use. The auto ID
function should never be used in a professional environment, or if it is,
the IDs must be moved back half a second or so to give CD players time to
play the track. Because of a CD player's un-mute function (built into the
specification), it takes approximately 17ms to kick in once it's found a
track, and there is really no excuse for not knowing this. I have albums
where it is impossible to play the beginning of any track because of this
kind of shoddy mastering. Some of these albums are Library Music CDs and are
therefore useless as you simple cannot play the beginning of any track. A
little more attention to detail will ensure these mistakes never happen.
Nick Jones
George Hawes
David Kilpatrick <icon...@btconnect.com> wrote:
>
>
> Andy Jackson wrote:
>
>
> > The CDR technology has improved so much in the last few years that I don't
> > believe this is now an issue, what is important is the quality of the
> > rcording !!
> >
> I've just made a dozen CD-Rs this afternoon on blue azo dye blanks and
> they play perfectly in a player which can be very muffled with some
> similar-looking disks, so yes, the quality does seem to be improving all
> the time.
As has been said before, the issue is that of the recording process -
a binary data stream CANNOT be muffled . . .
Nigel McKenzie
>> they play perfectly in a player which can be very muffled with some
>> similar-looking disks, so yes, the quality does seem to be improving all
>> the time.
>
>As has been said before, the issue is that of the recording process -
>a binary data stream CANNOT be muffled . . .
>
how CD's work. So they a quite happy believing that the colour of the
disc changes its sound.
CD's of all types just contain data.
In the case of audio CD's this represents audio and what you recover
when you play it, is a perfect copy of what was recorded. It can't be
anything else.
A damaged CD will still play perfectly, up to the point where the error
correction can't recover the data. It will then start to skip, click and
burp.
If it sound muffled, dull, harsh, quiet, or anything else, it was a poor
recording.
This is easily done, because producing a master CD is a job for a
professional.
--
Nigel McKenzie
Ian Anderson
> If it sound muffled, dull, harsh, quiet, or anything else, it was a poor
> recording.
> This is easily done, because producing a master CD is a job for a
> professional.
All Pete Coe was suggesting in this thread was that the re-issued Trailer
CDs didn't sound good, and that it seemed from the evidence that legal
copyright regulations were being infringed. Whether you think CDRs are
worth having is a side -issue. If the re-mastering of the original tapes is
crap, if the artists are robbed, and if the graphical/ notes presentation is
poor, I'm pleased that Pete is warning the community. All the rest of the
techno-babble here is interesting but not really relevant - an immoral
rip-off is an immoral rip-off, and I for one am pleased to be alerted.
Thanks, Pete.
--
Ian Anderson
fRoots magazine
fro...@frootsmag.com
http://www.frootsmag.com
remove anti-junkmail .donot to reply
Nigel McKenzie
>All Pete Coe was suggesting in this thread was that the re-issued Trailer
>CDs didn't sound good, and that it seemed from the evidence that legal
>copyright regulations were being infringed. Whether you think CDRs are
>worth having is a side -issue.
Having re-read the original article in this tread, no mention is made of
any copyright being infringed and there is a heavy inference that a CD-R
will be of inferior quality.
Anyway all threads suffer from 'topic drift'.
Are CD-R's worth having? Probably not.
If enough has been spent on recording, mixing and mastering, to produce
even a semi-professional product, the cost of having a 1000 copies
pressed is not going to look like much.
--
Nigel McKenzie
ban...@cix.compulink.co.uk
mcn...@dial.pipex.com (Nigel McKenzie) wrote:
> Having re-read the original article in this tread, no mention is
> made of
> any copyright being infringed and there is a heavy inference that a
> CD-R
> will be of inferior quality.
> Anyway all threads suffer from 'topic drift'.
>
Maybe not the first message, but in the fourth one Pete made it not
reasonably clear, I feel.
To quote:
"But we're not talking about masters, we're talking about CDRs of
dubious quality, produced in house & not registered with
MCPS/PRS."
In other words, no money likely to go to the original artists, I think
you'll find.
David Kilpatrick
George Hawes wrote:
> As has been said before, the issue is that of the recording process -
> a binary data stream CANNOT be muffled . . .
>
It seems to my ears that it can. CD players use oversampling processes
to extract all or part of the data. I believe one-bit bitstream players
are supposed to be the most accurate.
I have over a dozen different CD players, probably 20 if you count
now-defunct ones. They range from the very earliest Technics decks, back
at the beginning of the 1980s, to brand new. Some are totally
incompatible with all CD-R media. Others will play some CD-Rs, but not
all types. In one JVC player I have, making the same CD-R copy on
various different types of media will produce various different levels
of volume, accompanied by loss of HF information and stereo spacing when
the volume is lost, on this player.
The CDs (CD-R media) pressed by mp3.com's original service two years ago
will play on this machine, but they sound totally woolly and badly
separated. CDs pressed by the current mp3.com service are very much
better all round.
If I extract the data from the CDs of different dates, it is identical.
They both look silver, too, not blue.
In theory digital data is digital data, full stop. But for some reason I
do not fully understand there is a real difference in the sound quality
obtained from the same file written using different writers, or to
different media. A computer appears to be able to 'see' identical data
on the CD-Rs, but an audio CD player for some reason can't guarantee to
produce identical sound.
I'm not making any claims about knowledge, or facts, I'm simply
describing what actually happens - perhaps someone out there knows
exactly why.
David
Paul Burke
>
> It seems to my ears that it can. CD players use oversampling processes
> to extract all or part of the data. I believe one-bit bitstream players
> are supposed to be the most accurate.
>
No, the oversampling is applied to the data after the CD has been read.
The original CD players back in 1980ish just used the data straight off
the disc at 44.1kHz sampling rate. This meant they had to use very hairy
filters on the output, with significant phase distortion well into the
audio band. Oversampling "promotes" the signal to a much higher
frequency, so the filters have less effect in the audible range.
>
> The CDs (CD-R media) pressed by mp3.com's original service two years ago
> will play on this machine, but they sound totally woolly and badly
> separated. CDs pressed by the current mp3.com service are very much
> better all round.
>
> If I extract the data from the CDs of different dates, it is identical.
> They both look silver, too, not blue.
Probably not reading one of the CDs properly. I don't know why the audio
CD player manufacturers don't use the same players as the computer ones,
they seem to read data very reliably from any medium and much faster
than audio CDs.
>
> In theory digital data is digital data, full stop. But for some reason I
> do not fully understand there is a real difference in the sound quality
> obtained from the same file written using different writers, or to
> different media. A computer appears to be able to 'see' identical data
> on the CD-Rs, but an audio CD player for some reason can't guarantee to
> produce identical sound.
>
Different coloured bytes perhaps? If you connect the CD player to the
blue phase of the mains, it will play blue CDRs better.
Paul Burke
bogus address
> All Pete Coe was suggesting in this thread was that the re-issued Trailer
> CDs didn't sound good, and that it seemed from the evidence that legal
> copyright regulations were being infringed.
In seemed like people were saying that this was a loophole in the law
and that what Bulmer was doing, however disgusting a piece of thievery
it might appear to be in any normal human being's concept of morality,
was perfectly legal.
In which case, maybe it might *also* be legal for the artists affected
to reissue their own stuff on CDR while telling Bulmer to stick his
presumed exclusive rights where a disk-burn laser don't shine?
========> Email to "jc" at this site; email to "bogus" will bounce. <========
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html food intolerance data and recipes,
freeware logic fonts for the Macintosh, and Scots traditional music resources
David Harris
aspects ?
There has been a lot of hokum and bunkum spouted about digital audio... I am a
thirty year experienced electronics engineer, with about 8 years in Pro and
Semi Pro audio, and when I bought my first CD player I bought the cheapest on
the basis that "digital is digital" and it will always sound the same. It was
horrible.
I have since conducted a lot of blind tests using various CDs and CD players
and there are huge differences, so much so, that even my wife (who isnt a
musician, electronics engineer or anything, and doesnt even LIKE music) can
tell the difference.... and we are talking almost "like for like" here.
I have also tested the various gadgets, like green pens, CD mats, other
stabilisers (housebricks), mains filters, various types of optical and
copper/silver cables, plugs, sockets etc etc etc ad nauseum !
My conclusions are somewhat varied, some work some dont. Its the same with
CDRs. Sometimes the "techie" is right, sometimes the "audiophile" is right,
sometimes the "esoteric brigade" are right. However, I do draw the line at
putting magnets/rubber triangles on speaker cones and lining up my amplifier
with the Earths magnetic field.
As far as the pressed CD medium is concerned, it is all down to the work of
the sound men (and women) who make the master recordings. A good soundman can
make an average band/singer/soloist sound halfway reasonable, a bad soundman
can make the LPO sound like amateur night.
As for CDRs, the same process applies up to a point, but then you are
dependent upon your hardware.
When I produced a master CDR to go to RPM for pressing (my first and only mass
produced effort), my first THREE CDRs were rejected due to excessively high
errors on my master. I had followed all the guidelines, burned on a high
quality TDK blank, at only 1x speed, and they were still rubbish. When I
changed to a Plextor CD burner, these problems were reduced by about 95% and
the master was accepted.
Although my previous burner was OK for domestic users, it really wasnt up to
professional standards. I bought it because it was fast and cheap, and like
all things you can only have 2 out of 3 : good, fast, cheap. I now have good
but expensive. My home HiFi CD player is a good quality Marantz, which will
play just about any CD/CDR I throw at it. I dont think it has ever refused
one. However, my car CD player is happier with blue burned CDRs than it is
with pressed silver ones !! Work that one out !!
Finally I am happy with the stuff that I produce, but sadly have just had to
close the studio due to my disability ! Bugger.
Horses for courses I suppose, but thats my fourpennyworth. I hope I haven't
bored you too much.
(the name of my previous CD burner has been withheld to avoid any legal
ramifications or mickey taking :)
David Harris
------------------
Chris Rockcliffe
bogus address wrote:
> (snip) ...seemed like people were saying that this was a loophole in
> the law and that what Bulmer was doing (snip) ...was perfectly legal.
> (snipped) ...might *also* be legal for the artists affected
> to reissue their own stuff on CDR while telling Bulmer to stick his
> presumed exclusive rights...
Succinctly put by Jack; and that legal logic or lack thereof, has been running
around my befuddled brain too.
gan canny,
CR
George Hawes
Ian Anderson <fro...@frootsmag.donot.com> wrote:
> if the artists are robbed, and if the graphical/ notes presentation is
> poor, I'm pleased that Pete is warning the community. All the rest of the
> techno-babble here is interesting but not really relevant - an immoral
> rip-off is an immoral rip-off, and I for one am pleased to be alerted.
Agreed. Sorry to have been part of that diversion into techno-babble!
Regards
George
ban...@cix.compulink.co.uk
address) wrote:
>
> > All Pete Coe was suggesting in this thread was that the re-issued
> > Trailer
> > CDs didn't sound good, and that it seemed from the evidence that
> > legal
> > copyright regulations were being infringed.
>
> In seemed like people were saying that this was a loophole in the
> law
> and that what Bulmer was doing, however disgusting a piece of
> thievery
> it might appear to be in any normal human being's concept of
> morality,
> was perfectly legal.
>
> In which case, maybe it might *also* be legal for the artists
> affected
> to reissue their own stuff on CDR while telling Bulmer to stick his
> presumed exclusive rights where a disk-burn laser don't shine?
>
While almost certainly illegal, I'd love to see someone try, if only
to flush Bulmer out. I have a reasonably good quality vinyl copy of
Bandoggs if young Master Coe wants something to copy from. I'm sure
the technology now exists to do a good job of the transfer.
And if Pete did decide to try it, I'd be happy to bung some money into
a legal fighting fund.......
Ian Anderson
> While almost certainly illegal, I'd love to see someone try, if only
> to flush Bulmer out. I have a reasonably good quality vinyl copy of
> Bandoggs if young Master Coe wants something to copy from. I'm sure
> the technology now exists to do a good job of the transfer.
Transfer technnology from records is certainly now good - anybody see/hear
Revenant's 7CD Charley Patton set from last year?
But not as good a job as state-of-the-art tweaked transfers from the original
masters, sadly. One of the reasons the revised English Country Blues Band
re-issue was done this year (apart from including the new Bob Copper track
and improving the crappy design of the first time round!) was that even in
the decade since it was first attempted, re-mastering technology (or maybe
just the skill) has greatly improved.
Now of course if somebody actually held a *master tape* of something
theoretically Bulmerised, plus all the memorabilia to produce a graphically
excellent repackage - which these CM CDRs don't - that would be another
matter entirely ;-) ;-)
--
IA
Howard Kaplan
> Are CD-R's worth having? Probably not.
> If enough has been spent on recording, mixing and mastering, to produce
> even a semi-professional product, the cost of having a 1000 copies
> pressed is not going to look like much.
>
Well, there's folk, and then there's folk.
There are groups like Steeleye Span who have a lot of instruments, who
require extensive and expensive recording (many takes, many tracks) and
mixing, and whose sound may well benefit from some of the refinements
that are added only at the mastering stage. These groups will need to
sell thousands of copies in any case, and for that quantity, a "real" CD
is the only economic option.
But there are also groups and individuals who are producing something
that can be effectively recorded in live stereo, on digitally clean but
not large equipment, even home equipment, in just a few takes per song.
These are often semi-professional performers with day jobs who
nonetheless are producing excellent recordings in niche markets. I'm
thinking of performers such as Judy Cook, the American singer of
unaccompanied ballads whom I first encountered at the Chippenham
festival, and the vocal trio of Burdett, Simpson, and Young from the
Midlands. In both cases, they are selling CD-Rs of minimum graphic
quality, obviously not overproduced, but containing very clearly
recorded music of excellent acoustic quality, and including songs not
easily found elsewhere. Many of the CD-R sales are at personal
appearances or via small Internet retailers, where fancy packaging
counts less than personal experience and personal recommendation. Their
legions of fans are likely to number in the hundreds or low thousands,
and CD-R is the only technology that makes sense.
This is all related to another thread that's been on this newsgroup, the
"two-in-a-bar" rule and all its consequences. If we are serious in our
claim that there is a continuing tradition of folk self-entertainment,
that the valuable experiences do not come only from listening to people
who can pack large venues and sell expensively-produced CDs, then we
should be welcoming the democratization of the CD format that current
generation CD-Rs has allowed. Despite what Marshall McLuhan said, the
medium is not the message, and some of the messages I've bought on the
CD-R format are much more valuable to me than the ones that have silver
linings.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Howard L. Kaplan
Songwriter and occasional performer
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Home page: http://www.thrinberry-frog.com
[Direct access to songsheets via songsheets.thrinberry-frog.com
is no longer available -- use the general home page instead]
Richard Robinson
>
>> All Pete Coe was suggesting in this thread was that the re-issued Trailer
>> CDs didn't sound good, and that it seemed from the evidence that legal
>> copyright regulations were being infringed.
>
>In seemed like people were saying that this was a loophole in the law
>and that what Bulmer was doing, however disgusting a piece of thievery
>it might appear to be in any normal human being's concept of morality,
>was perfectly legal.
>
>In which case, maybe it might *also* be legal for the artists affected
>to reissue their own stuff on CDR while telling Bulmer to stick his
>presumed exclusive rights where a disk-burn laser don't shine?
This is likely to go down in a fuddle of "We Are Not Lawyers", but ... I
wonder what rights exist ? Apart from physical possession of the primary
source, of course, which is usually said to be 90% of the matter.
Pete's comment concerned non-registration with MCPS, which is to licence the
use of copyright material from its owners (and take care of passing the
relevant fees on to the right place). So, if someone burned a CD-R off an
old copy of the vinyl and sold it, they would be just as wrong in terms of
not respecting copyright - unless they took care of this. I wonder what the
MCPS would do with an application to use material re-formatted in this way ?
There would, of course, be a huge weight of interest in objecting to this.
See all the moves towards copy-prevention of commercial CDs, bootlegging
shock horror. The issue would very possibly not be copyright, since it's
possible than a bulmerised CD could contain only material from Trad.Anon.
It would be fun if he owned copright on some, he could find himself
receiving royalty cheques from homemade reissues he knew nothing about ...
Would it be Performing Rights, then, the PRS ?
I suppose the central issue is what papers he got artists signatures on,
the contract between himelf and the artists, rather than either of these ?
Not that that ought to cover him against a breach-of-copyright charge, if
he's not paying the license fee to copyright owners. And likewise with
performing rights, I suppose ... what would be the situation of, eg, the BBC
were to play this material, where would the PRS fee go ? Is there any way
they could be warned ? .... where's the Union when it's needed ?
Bleargh
</rambling speculation>
--
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem
David Harris
gently snip't
> Pete's comment concerned non-registration with MCPS, which is to licence the
> use of copyright material from its owners (and take care of passing the
> relevant fees on to the right place). So, if someone burned a CD-R off an old
> copy of the vinyl and sold it, they would be just as wrong in terms of not
> respecting copyright - unless they took care of this. I wonder what the MCPS
> would do with an application to use material re-formatted in this way ?
We are waiting to hear from EMI on exactly this issue (Jake Thackray LPs to CDRs
private release). MCPS referred us to EMI as they currently hold publishing
rights, not Jake ! It would appear that we will not be issued with a MCPS (or
PRS) licence until EMI deign to grant us publishing rights.
> There would, of course, be a huge weight of interest in objecting to this. See
> all the moves towards copy-prevention of commercial CDs, bootlegging shock
> horror. The issue would very possibly not be copyright, since it's possible
> than a bulmerised CD could contain only material from Trad.Anon. It would be
> fun if he owned copright on some, he could find himself receiving royalty
> cheques from homemade reissues he knew nothing about ... Would it be
> Performing Rights, then, the PRS ?
>
> I suppose the central issue is what papers he got artists signatures on, the
> contract between himelf and the artists, rather than either of these ? Not
> that that ought to cover him against a breach-of-copyright charge, if he's not
> paying the license fee to copyright owners. And likewise with performing
> rights, I suppose ... what would be the situation of, eg, the BBC were to play
> this material, where would the PRS fee go ? Is there any way they could be
> warned ? .... where's the Union when it's needed ?
They referred me to MCPS :))
> Richard Robinson
> "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem
David Harris
Ex G8INA Studios.