Can someone tell me what is the best and most compatible CD-r Media ?? Thanks in advance ! p.s. Ritek printable is horrible .. Sony seems OK but not good enough.
The best and most compatible media ARE the ones that work with your drive to deliver the lowest errors at a price you are willing to pay. There is far less difference between CD-Rs today than there is between DVD discs. If you are having trouble with Ritek printable discs, you may need to identify your drive and its firmware, the speed at which you are recording, and the rated speed of the discs you are using. Recording at too fast or too slow a speed for the rating of the discs will produce poor recordings no matter how good the media are.
On the other hand, you may be talking about compatibility with printers and not recording drives. That is not clear. There are many different printable finishes on discs today, and you may need to identify what finish is on the discs you like.
Compatable meaning the best quality discs that can be read in old CD Players and in New CD Players. I want to burn audio CD's and play them on my old CDI player. Ritex is NG and Sony is just acceptable. I want the best media reguardless of the price.
When you say Ritek media are no good, you must mean that their 52X 80-minute 700MB discs using phthalocyanine dye and their particular molding process do not work on your older players after being recorded on your recording drive. (This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the discs, only that the combination does not work for you.) Sony discs perform better in your case.
The discs that will work best on your older players are the original 63-minute slow speed discs. They are no longer available, and neither are the next alternative--the 74-minute versions. All that is available today are 52X or 48X 80-minute discs whose pit separations make it difficult for older players to read. Your best bet is to check some other combinations that may perform better, and that leaves CMC/Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden. They use different dyes, and the slower reacting Taiyo Yuden cyanine dye might produce better results for playback than the faster reacting CMC/Verbatim (they are the same) phthalocyanine dye. In your case it is less a question of quality than that of compatibility with a modern recorder and older playback units.
It seems I may have hit on software, media, and hardware that is working so far. The CD-R discs I purchased are made for HP in Taiwan and are injet printable. The burner I am using is a few years old made by BenQ. If I remember the original specs this burners claim to fame is even burning throughout the disc. The software I found is made by a company called Ashampoo. The copying software they make is great. It is their version 8 and it really works. Forget Nero ... This is much better. Either way thanks for your help as your answers helped me find a solution.
