CD Burner Basics

Dave,

I've used a PC for doing this job - it's a pain in the bum, but does allow some benefits.

You need decent soundcard, my Soundblaster Live measures well, is very quiet and sounds s**t.

My older AWE64 is much noisier, yet much more musical - not such a good compromise either.

You need to get the PC close to the system, another pain, and the noise from the fans in mine makes any serious auditioning of results a joke!

Once sampled to hard disk (you'll need 7-800 Mb of disk space, at least twice that if you wish to do any editing) most CD authoring software makes burning audio CD's a cinch.

There's also some very good, and surprisingly musically transparent, cleaning up tools for removing crackles and pops.

It's a lot easier to buy a home audio burner and plug it in the system. It's less time consuming and likely to give better results.

Others may have experience of specific units.

Alternatively, you could mod your Lingo so that it doesn't upset your Naim system - Ooops a bit late

Andy.

Andy.

For me the best way is to use an external stand-alone A to D converter plugged into a pc sound card's digital input.
Even a minidisk recorder's internal converter does a better job than a consumer level soundcard.
The PC's power supply is so scrappy, it is almost impossible to have more than a 14 bit resolution.

The PC is much more userfriendly and gives more possibilities for editing, corrections... than an audio CD recorder...and here in Canada, blank music CD are much more expensive than data CD (10 times, because of a special tax for copyrights, may be irrevelant for you).

Emmanuel

>The PC's power supply is so scrappy

Unfortunately its not possible to upgrade your PC with a HiCap ;-)

I also would strongly recommend to use an external A/D-converter. If you have a CD-recorder or MiniDisk, you can use it as a converter.

Also take care of the blank CDs you use!! There are big differences in data-integrity and longlastingness (I use Mitsumi SG).

If you need an external SPIDF-interface for your computer, you could have a look to
egosys

But finally I recommend to use a HiFi-CD-Burner.

Best wishes from Jun!

[This message was edited by Jun Keller on THURSDAY 30 August 2001 at 17:34.]

...and buy a CD recorder (as opposed to CDR drive for your PC) - I plumped for a Marantz DR6000 which is pretty darned good - almost as nice sounding as a CD5, in fact (although it falls at the final hurdle, but then represents much better value as it records CDs much better than the CD5).

In fact, now that I come to think of it, I'll never have a Naim CD player now as they don't have digital outputs, IIRC...

Sad, 'cause I was toying with the CDX/XPS as a possible purchase for next year. Guess I'll have to look elsewhere...

Getting back onto the point, a standalone CD recorder is a much easier beast to use in the sense that it will record directly from analogue inputs, which is handy for LP backup. OTOH, you have to set track index points manually this way, and it's a pain...

John