"Burning" Your Own Discs on Your PC or Stereo
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By Daniel Greenberg
The Washington Post
January 30, 1998; Page N39
Not long ago, the only realistic way to record your own CDs was to invest in a CD-pressing plant. But now CD-Recordable (CD-R) drives cost what plain old CD-ROM drives cost just a few years ago and even more shocking, they've become easy to use.
CD-R drives use blank CDs that cost from $1.50 to $4 each. CD-R data discs can be read by an ordinary CD-ROM drive; audio recordings can play in any CD player. (It's legal to make a copy of recorded music for personal use, but not for sale.) You can add more material to a single CD-R disc over several recording sessions, but you can't erase old material or fix any mistakes. A new format, CD-Rewritable (CD-RW), lets you write and erase discs just like floppy discs (very big floppy discs), but CD-RW discs can only be read by other CD-RW drives, not a regular CD-ROM drive or audio CD player. And blank CD-RW discs cost about $25 to $30, making this medium not ready for prime time as far as audio recording goes.
Currently, the cheapest way to get into the CD-recording business is via your computer. We tested two options from Sony and Hewlett-Packard.
The Sony Spressa 928E, an internal CD-R drive (Win 95, $339), offers a rock-bottom price. But it's only for people comfortable with opening their computer and fiddling with IDE cables, and it lacks decent CD-writing software.
By contrast, the H-P SureStore CD Writer Plus 7110e costs more (Win 95, $610) but offers a pain-free install: Just plug this external drive into your parallel port. I was "burning" CDs within 15 minutes of opening the box. The SureStore can also record and erase files on CD-Rewritable discs great for making personal backups, which you normally wouldn't need to use on other computers anyway. Both drives write data at 2x speeds and read CDs slower than regular CD-ROM drives (the Sony is 8x; the HP, 6x).
We also checked out Adaptec's Easy CD Creator Deluxe (Win 95, $99), which neither the Sony nor the Hewlett-Packard drives include (although the H-P unit bundles a stripped-down version). Its best feature is its CD Spin Doctor, an audio-CD toolkit. Spin Doctor can take audio from any source CD, cassette, even LPs and automagically mark off CD tracks at pauses and clean up the sound. This is especially cool for vinyl fans with albums that never came out on CD; you can get rid of those annoying pops, clicks and hisses on old wax. This filtering process, however, takes a lot of time about 20 minutes for a four-minute song and can degrade the overall audio quality, although you can adjust the filtering levels for optimum results. When I used Spin Doctor on some ancient, scratchy, rare LPs, the songs were much cleaner, but noticeably less bright. Still, the results were absolutely worth it: The CD-R drive made clean CD versions of my scratchy LPs, something I couldn't have found in any store.
All this software configuration sound too confusing? Philips's CDR 870 recorder connects to your stereo, not your computer, and copies audio CDs, plus such analog sources as cassettes and LPs, to CD-R and CD-RW discs. The last time Fast Forward reviewed stand-alone CD audio recorders the late Jurassic age of April 1995 they cost $4,000, and we made the daring prediction that CD-R units would sell for less than $1,000 by the year 2000. This model costs $650; like the computer drives, it worked well, but it can't do any Spin Doctor-style filtering. Would-be digital recordists might also want to investigate Sony's MiniDisc format, which uses rewritable discs about half the size of CDs and costs less, with recording units going for as low as $350.
For the true upgrade fetishist, the specter of recordable Digital Video/ Versatile Disc (DVD) looms; this format will allegedly arrive later this year and, depending on the clumsiness of the consumer electronics industry, might make recordable CDs obsolete. Then again, it might show up as a hideously expensive, impractical toy... somewhat like recordable CDs three years ago.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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