Re: [ARSCLIST] Mitsui / MAM-A Gold CD's

[Andy Lanset <alanset@xxxxxxxx>]

Folks may also want to check out the following:

Shahani, Chandru J., Basil Manns and Michele Youket, Longevity of CD
Media Research at the Library of Congress, Preservation, Research and
Testing Division. http://www.loc.gov/preserv/studyofCDlongevity.pdf .

Carou, Alain, Twenty Years After: Degradation Survey of a Large
Collection of Optical Discs, A report presented before the Joint
Technical Symposium, Toronto, Canada , June 24-26, 2004.
http://www.jts2004.org/english/proceedings/Carou.htm .

Byers, Fred R., Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for
Librarians and Archivists, Council on Library and Information Resources
(CLIR) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Washington, D.C., October 2003.
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/pub121.pdf


Andy Lanset, Archivist
WNYC New York Public Radio
1 Centre Street 26th Floor
New York, NY 10007
212-669-4685
212-553-0629 FAX 

-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard L. Hess
Sent: Friday, December 08, 2006 1:01 PM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Mitsui / MAM-A Gold CD's


At 11:34 AM 2006-12-08, Elliott Hancock wrote:
>I am curious what the experts on this list have to say about the 
>information in the following link which rates discs.  It places MAM-A 
>and archival discs in the "sham" category.
>
>http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

Well, this is certainly interesting. It's presented as hard facts, 
but without much documentation.

My experience: I started using T-Y gold discs in 1998 when I got a 
333 MHz Dell computer. I had good results, but the long-term dye 
stability and 1-2% reports of incompatibility with some audio players 
caused me to switch within the year to Mitsui gold CD-Rs. My 1-2% 
reports of non-playability went away.

I have used a variety of DVDs, but only when the MAM-A gold ones 
became available, did I consider using them for archival storage for 
client projects. So far, I've had no complaints in the year that I've 
been using them other than two clients who asked for them and then 
didn't know what to do with them.

(I want high resolution digital files--OK, I can provide them on a 
DVD--fine--shipment--I can't play the disc you sent me--much later--I 
finally got it to play but my editor won't accept the files--mail him 
CDs at a loss). So that's certainly not a disc problem.

I've had NO media returns since 1999. Kodak chose MAM-E to make their
media.

MAM-X is a licensee of Mitsui who owns the phthalocyanine dye 
patents. See Joe Iraci's article at:
http://www.uni-muenster.de/Forum-Bestandserhaltung/downloads/iraci.pdf
His accelerated aging tests showed phthalocyanine dye CD-R as 
longer-lived than manufactured CDs.

And it stands to reason that gold is more stable than silver or 
aluminum as a reflective layer.

The other side of this is if I do have a problem with the discs, no 
one can point and say that I tried to cheap out. I chose what many 
people thought were the best available discs and I periodically check 
them (probably not as often as I should).

I have NOT seen Charles Lawson's damaged disc rate but I did have one 
spindle of gold CD-Rs that a few didn't burn for what appeared to be 
disc reasons, but changing the burn rate solved that. I now burn at 
16x and that seems to be reliable. I burn at 4x for DVD-R although I 
would consider the 8x discs.

Obviously, I wouldn't use a product for perception alone if I were 
having trouble with it, but what has been good for me over time 
coupled with the premium perception of the product in many areas is a 
good choice for the work that I do.

My choice was to buy the gold CD-Rs in jewel cases from American 
Digital, but now I buy them in spindles as no one that I can find is 
importing MAM-A jewel-cased CDs from the U.S. to Canada. I try to be 
very careful and close the cake boxes quickly to keep dust out.

While the ratings page cited in the quoted message seems to like 
Maxell discs, I have heard of problems with them from multiple 
sources, although I am a great fan of their tape products.

Finally, I started out with a Yamaha CD burner and it worked well, 
but when it failed after probably fewer than a thousand discs, I 
purchased a Plextor drive and haven't looked back. I have three 
working Plextor CD writers and four working Plextor DVD/CD writers 
here. I use the DVD writers in my production machines in the studio 
as I'm delivering as many DVDs these days as CDs it seems with many 
institutional clients then copying those files into their digital
repositories.

For very large projects, I prefer hard drives as a delivery mechanism.

Cheers,

Richard


Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information:
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.