2 Questions. Is firewire available for audio and at what speed should I burn my CD's?

[Imagine]

Is firewire available for audio and at what speed should I burn my CD's?

1) I know there's been a lot of talk about Firewire drives and their capabilities and flaw's, but is there a Firewire drive out there ready for audio?

2) A- Would there be any sound quality difference from a CD mix to a CD burner at any speed?

B- Is there a specific rate to burn a CD?

I mix my music to a Tascam CD-RW5000 and would like to make copies on my new Firewire 16X CD Burner and was wondering if any tests were done to see if there's any sound quality change whatsoever. I find that when I burn anywhere between 2x and 16x, there's a slight distortion in the mix.

Anyone else experience that problem?

Thanks
Imagine

[Imagine]

Anyone

Thanks

[tomcat]

about firewire, in my experience, a 7,200 rpm drive works for audio. I have been running a film/tv mixing room onfirewire drives since september with no drive trouble. up to 64 sparsly-populated tracks. i'm sure it would choke if the tracks all had audio at the same time, but that's not going to happen in a film session. unless you need to max out the performance of pt with tons of dense tracks, i say go for it.

[love666]

there are many threads on this subject. my reading of them says use ATA for 001, SCSI for TDM.

[love666]

also, all the mastering engineers I know burn at 1X, so –

[Mount Royal]

Slower CDW burning speeds used to be postulated as more safe than high speeds. Concensus no longer favors this, I think. My LaCie Firewire CDW burns well at 12x. There have been no burn errors that Jam Verify, or I, have found at 12x.

John Caldwell

[edhamilton]

The right speed to burn audio cd's is a matter of trial and error.
There are so many variable in a system that there is no one right answer.
Every time I start using a faster speed, sooner or later I get one CD that has glitches!
Different media can help but my rule has become,
If its going out to pressing, broadcast, or final delivery of any kind I use 2X.
If its for anything less "final" I will push it with a higher speed.

[Zep Dude]

Ahh burn speeds...
This is a loaded question because it really just comes down to what works between the type of media and the type of burner. From both personal experience and reading many threads, the safest bet always seems to be 2x. I had a situation where 2x worked on certain flaky older CD player while the same exact CD burned at 4x did not (using a Yamaha mechanism). Your best bet is to get an older portable cd player or car cd player and test your different burn speeds and media to find what works. Quality CD players are most apt to play anything so make sure you test on something a little older and more tempermental.

Regarding the whole firewire situation, I'm interested in this as well. There are definitely people who've posted success with both firewire and ATA drives (which are basically the same thing) as long as they are at least 7200 speed. The access times (critical for keeping up with edits across many tracks) are certainly not as fast as a good SCSI drive but how much do you need? If you're only pulling 24 simultaneous tracks without heavy editing, this may be possible with a firewire drive. Also, remember that you can adjust the DAE buffer to get more tracks from a drive (at the expense of more sluggish performance). Since firewire drives are dramatically cheaper than SCSI, you could certainly buy two and split the tracks across the drives. This would save you the PCI slot for the scsi card and allow another mix card.

By the way, someone please correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the firewire bandwidth (400mbits/sec) approx 50meg/sec? This translates to a theoretical 400 tracks of 24bit/44.1 audio.

[shadowbox]

Re: Burn Speeds

I recently asked this question and the overwhelming majority of responses said it was important to burn at 1X or 2X if you are sending it to a duplication house. This is to ensure that you have the least amount of errors on the cd. However, if you are just making a copy for yourself--burn as fast as you want. If you hear a difference, only you can answer the question of how fast. For me, I couldn't hear a difference between 2X and 12X. Also, keep in mind that other people may not be able to hear the difference because their cd players may be better (or worse) overall at reading errors. Or they may just not be able to hear the difference at all.

One more thing, try burning the files from your fastest and least fragmented drive. This way when burning there is less chance of errors.

[This message has been edited by shadowbox (edited February 24, 2001).]

[motopsyco]

Firewire?, did someone mention Firewire? There are no "Audio ready" firewire HDD's per se. The drives based on the 7200rpm, low seek rate HHD's (as in the IBM GXP line) are said to work well.

Yamaha's mLan looks good.

If you can wait (for a few months?), drives using the faster bridge boards should begin to hit the market. Read about it at www.barefeats.com ; it's going to be very kewl because they will be more capable of exploiting the theoretical 400mb/s data rate.

I can not offer a experienced answer to your burn rate to sonic quality query since I do not create CD's for sonic quality as yet. What I have done is of practical use only using the cheapest data (green) type media. I have a QueFire! 12/10/32 and have burned a number of audio CD's for personal use. I've done them all at 12x and they are (accounting for level matching and light EQ'ing that I have done) identical to my CD sources. Just don't expect them to play reliably in cars and portable players.

Cheers!



[This message has been edited by motopsyco (edited February 24, 2001).]