back half of CD blank

Steve wrote;

The other thing that often gets overlooked is the need to clean the focus assembly lens on a regular basis, since it's in an ideal place to gather dust. This has fixed similar problems with a lot of machines!

How do you go about it, Steve, do you use one of these cleaning CD's?

How do you go about it, Steve, do you use one of these cleaning CD's?

No, I never use so-called 'cleaning CDs' or tape path cleaners either, come to that. I have small pieces of chamois leather on sticks to use as an applicator, and for CD lenses, distilled or deionised water is all you need. You don't want to apply too much pressure either, because the lens is mounted at the top of the focus assembly, and this has finite elasticity limits which you don't want to exceed. I tend to use 2 sticks, one wet one and one to dry it off afterwards. And you only need to moisten the wet one, not soak it.

You would probably get away with using cotton buds, but they are not recommended for this task, because they tend to shed bits of cotton lint, and you can often end up with a worse mess than when you started!

You will find the sticks available ready-made here. If you think that they are too wide, then you can cut them in half quite easily. The CD cleaning device shown on the page is typical of the type, and it only uses brushes, which I don't think is sufficient.

I remember when I was cleaning my early pioneer and sony cd players
that the sony lens could be pushed down whereas the pioneer one could not be pushed down and could only move from side to side unlike the sony. Also the sony player had an plastic cover around the lens and the pioneer one didn't. The pioneer one was much more solid built in my opinion. I think the best way to clean the lens is with one of those air brush cans. I also believe the cd cleaning kits which use some sort of isoprol achohol removes the special dye that is on the lens.

I'm not sure if the lenses are coated or not - but distilled water won't remove the coating anyway, but you should definitely avoid alcohol. The only purpose of the coating if it is used is to reduce the plastic/air impedance mismatch - that's all it could do at that point (same principle as coated lenses on cameras).

Not all systems move the lens front to focus them - there are several other ways to do this, and make the servo track.

Possibly irrelevant but I had a Pioneer DVD 106 that could burn and read CD's and burn DVD's but would NOT under any circumstances READ DVD's. Not even the DVD's I had just burned with the 106. It burned DVD's no problem but read them, no way!

Replacing it with an NEC sorted it out.

Mark

Oh dear matron .. let's give all the kids little sticks that they can poke around in their CD recorder seems to be the advice .. if you see anyone with a little stick confescate it or we'll never hear the end of it!!!

Oh dear matron ..

How on earth are we ever going to wean you off those 'carry on' films?  

[57.41]

I decided on this little addendum after some recent experience. For several years I've read the claims that Sony and a few other brands are TaiyoYuden – if manufactured in Japan. I don't think that last bit was emphasized quite enough in this discussion.

For the past few years I've looked at the labels whenever I'm in any store that carries CD-R blanks. I've never found any that said made in Japan. I've also never found any TY blanks under their own name, although I can buy them in bulk via mail order. I've purchased those and Mitsui long distance.

A while back I purchased some Sony blanks when my mail order supply ran low due to my inattention. These, like all others I ever looked at, were made in India, or Thailand, or wherever. They seemed to work fine, but having no way to test CDs, I felt less secure about them than about those with a more established reputation.

Recently I obtained a Lite-On CD-RW drive so I could test my writing results with KProbe2. While the Sony disks play ok, most do not test well. Error rates on most were 10X as high as the Mitsui, some even worse (e.g C1 Average: 10 to 15). Mostly I've used the TY for data backup rather than audio, but those few I had made into audio CDs tested much like the Mitsui.

Then I bought a package of Fujifilm blanks, again not manufactured in Japan. While the audio written to them played well, it tested really badly, worse than the Sonys. The star performer of bad numbers, from the approx. 1/3 package (of 50) that I used, containing a little more than 72 minutes of audio, produced KProbe2 results
C1 Max : 438
C1 Average : 57.41
C1 Total : 172,299
C2 Max : 141
C2 Average : 1.98
C2 Total : 5,942
I'm not sure what these numbers really mean (if anything) because this disk plays without any audible problems in the several CD players in which I could test it. Also, EAC extracted from it in secure mode at a moderately high speed, reporting no errors.

My label reading finally paid off. I found some Fujifilm that say they are made in Japan. Unlike the other Fujifilm, or the Sony, the internal labels on these say TY, the dye type listed is the same as used by TY, and the business side of the disks look like the genuine TY I've purchased mail order. These also seem to perform like TY. The average of test numbers for those I've used so far are
C1 Max : 9
C1 Average : 0.32
C1 Total : 987
C2 Max : 0
C2 Average : 0
C2 Total : 0

You should be able to look at disk info with your PROBE software or your burning app (I use NERO and Plextools Pro) to ID the disk MFG.  Fujifilm disks I've checked are, in fact, TY.

If you mean look at the internal manufacturer's label (or whatever official name it may have), yes, that can be done with several different tools. While that information is often completely unreliable, the Sony and the first Fujifilm packages did not pretend to be TY. The dye type was also different, and the disks' writing side definitely look different.

Most importantly, of course, they perform differently (at least in the manner discussed). However, so far I am not convinced that the KProbe results have the slighest practical meaning.

FWIW, your KProbe results on the TY disk are not out of line with what I would expect to see using Plextools on a nearly 80-minute CD.

The "made in Japan" disks are fine. The same brand name disks that are made elsewhere are vastly inferior. Perhaps it is a matter of marketing strategy, distribution warehouses, who knows. but in more than three years of frequently looking for "made in Japan" blanks, I have found them only one time. So, simply buying by brand name can be a rather poor (i.e. unlikely) way to get quality materials.

Like Andy - I've been caught out by both Sony and Fuji discs that are not made in Japan. To be blunt - the non-Japanese discs are terrible. Some recorders refuse to work with them and those that do work give bad error rates when the discs are tested with Plextools.

The only T-Y branded discs I've seen came from PMD who had a stock of these discs when I last looked. Otherwise you'll need to look for an alternative brand that are guaranteed to be T-Y, like Plextor discs from Ebuyer, or go to somewhere like SVP for unbranded T-Y discs. All the suppliers I've mentioned are in the UK - I would guess that similar suppliers exist in other countries.

Cheers

James.

These descriptions are similar to my experiences too.  In fact, I have over 100 DVD blanks that I thought would be good but under the label I find a dubious manufacturer.

US distributors of TY discs are easily found by Google or any number of other ways.  Impossible to find reliably through consumer outfits, great to find through pro distributors.