Kodak Gold Discs Problems

[Albinoni]

I recently went out and bought 10 Kodak Gold 650MB Gold CD-R's and I purposely choose Kodak due to their reputation of Gold discs. Well time to burn the MP3's onto one of these discs, as I removed the jewel case from the shrink wrap and placed it into my Liteon 48246S burner, and went ahead with the burn using Nero as usual. The burn process took about 10 mins or slightly more at a speed of 4x and all went well on that side of things.

Now coming to play the disc in my Sony Discman, after placing the disc and closing the lid, the disc started to spin, then stop, then spin and then finally stop, like it sounded that the Discman was strugling to read the CD-R. So I decided to open and close the lid and I was back to square one again, once again the disc would spin then stop then spin then stop. Finally on the third or 5th attemp the disc did finally spin and the amount of tracks with timeetc came up. I did finally attempt to plug in my Grado headphones and play the unit, it did play well, but unfortunately there was a very slight but of skipping on some tracks, not bad but you could pick it up, and especially with Track 1.

Now I've never ever had any of these problems when using any other discs apart from the Kodak Gold discs. I mainly use the Kodak Ultima Gold & Silver discs and these have worked like a charm, with no reading errors what so ever,but I just decided this time to give the Kodak Gold a shot. So pls help me, whats to blame my burner or my discman. Also BTW my Sony Discman is almost if not over 10 yrs old.

[cfitz]

I would be inclined to blame the player. Well, more exactly, the combination of the media and the player. Not all players are compatible with CD-R media, particularly the older players such as yours. And compatibility varies with the media. So it is not unreasonable to find that your player can play some CD-R media, but not others.

Have you checked the quality of the burns on the new discs using CD Speed or CD Doctor? That might tell you something if you find that the Kodak Golds are showing tons of errors. But I expect you will simply find that the problem is that your player just doesn't like the Gold media. If so, just stick with the silver-gold with which you have been having good success. They are cheaper anyway, aren't they?

cfitz

[jase]

Older gold media could be less reflective than more modern silver media, particularly in the case of Kodak (note that I'm not saying that gold is worse than silver, more that older discs were less compatible in the main than newer ones in some drives).

That, coupled with your old player, as cfitz says could lead to the problem.

Anyway, I've always done the following : for CDs I wish to keep, make a master on a good disc (Kodak, TY, Mitsui, Ricoh, Verb etc) and then copy it onto a cheapo disc (cheaper the better) and flog that to death on portables etc. When it wears out, chuck it away and make another one.

[cfitz]

Anyway, I've always done the following : for CDs I wish to keep, make a master on a good disc (Kodak, TY, Mitsui, Ricoh, Verb etc) and then copy it onto a cheapo disc (cheaper the better) and flog that to death on portables etc. When it wears out, chuck it away and make another one.

That is a good strategy, and one I follow as well. Keep a master in the safe, and let disposable cheapies take the abuse that they are likely to encounter in the auto/portable environment.

cfitz.