Attention All Accomplished Studio Engineers!!!

[24-bit]

Do you have any tips on choosing CD/DVD duplication houses?? I remember reading a story a while ago where Roger Nichols was having the Steely Dan album dup'ed by a house, and the quality was all screwed up to his surprise. He had to go through some process to get it resolved. I can't remember the whole story, but it makes me worry.

How do you know which is the right place, how to check if the conversion was done right, etc. Are the cheap houses worse in quality sound than the more expensive ones? Thanks!!

[spudsound]

Mainly the best thing to do is talk to as many people as possible which you trying to do already and get recommendations...
Call the dup houses and ask to hear some examples of the work they have carried out....
What type of project are you doing is it full commercial or short run?
As some places that offer short run dup's basically burn CDr's in a multiple batch of say 50-100 this can be quite cost effective if your only selling a demo in venues etc..
Proffessional dup houses should create a glass master then press from this (not burnt) this pressing should be as good as the orginal master that you supply but beware of any errors that your disc may have as these will be duplicated and potentially some more introduced.. this would explain why some dup houses have had some bad reports errors happen fact of life....
however there is a BLER system that reads Block error rate some disc can have as little as 10 errors per disc where others as many as 1000 per disc but these are usually repaired by the error correction on you CD player but a BLER rate of 100 or below would be preferable although you won't have the software to read these....nut a proffesional dup house should and should reject a master that has too high a BLER ..

[tzujan]

I don't know if I fit the description in the Subject heading; however you should check out Groove House . On my most recent project they came highly recommended by our mastering engineer, and they did a wonderful job. I have used some other "big name" places in the past with nothing but disappointment in the final product.

[Bryan Cook]

I wholeheartedly second the GrooveHouse reccomendation.

[24-bit]

Thanks guys!

[Electrohermit]

I believe that story is posted on www.johnvestman.com

Im using John Vestman for my current album. John will master your CD and Im sure that he can likewise offer some advise where to go to duplicate, etc.

In any case, check out the web site above for lots of good tips and hints for good production in the digital domain.

[MusicTrax]

Im using John Vestman for my current album. John will master your CD and Im sure that he can likewise offer some advise where to go to duplicate, etc.

I'm sure it's possible the guy does good mastering work, but a couple of his statements on the website concern me. His statements about $1500 audio cables being desirable, plus the thing about MiniDiscs' frequency response being limited to 17K because "their sampling frequency is only 32K"... that stuff is just plain wacky.

--Marc W.