Cambridge Audio CD4 SE- Upgrade ? CD-R Errors ?

Fredman - You are on to something in your last message where you talk about burning your CD-Rs at slower speeds. I own a commercial media duplication company, and we duplicate hundreds of CDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs, and videotapes each month. You will get a better duplicate disc if you duplicate your media at 1X or 2X play speed.
I've learned this from much experience the "hard way". No matter what some some computer weenie tells you - there is no way you are going to duplicate a decent sounding disc at 16X or 32X!!! All of these faster burn speeds were mostly brought about due to the inability of the computer market to come up with a reasonably fast back-up system. So they decided some time ago to start writing data - rather than audio - backups at higher speeds and a few "time challenged" audio types "thought" they could do the same thing. While it is possible to duplciate audio CDs at higher speeds - the quality almost always suffers greatly. If you are looking for quality CDRs, I can also suggest you look into buying Mitsui, Tao Yuden, Maxell, and Sony. My comapny has tried virtually all the commercial brands and find the overall quality control on the above mentioned brands to be quite consistent from one batch to the next.

I purchased some TDK Audio CD-R media, and so far they are working in my player. I havent compared sound quality but my gut response is that they do sound better at a slower speed burn rate (8x). I'm gonna keep working my way down and see how it goes at 4X and 2X.

I appreciate all of the responses- thank you. I also received some good information from the Cambridge technical support contact; it may be a good approach to contact the manufacturer with questions about certain equipment.

It really depends on your player which will work best for you. It is my understanding that while there are many brands of cdr's there are only a few different plants that make the blanks, so one set of bulk disks could be the same as a branded jewel case type. I read an article that mentioned that the 'Black' type is easy to read for many players, but haven't tried them as they really do cost more and I have plenty of cheapos that work fine. I wouldn't worry about brand, but buy a few 3 packs of different dye colors and see what happens.

More info than you may want:
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_dye.shtml

Thank you for that suggestion; I have been wondering about cd media quality- are there any brands or types- or even colors- that are generally accepted as offering better sound quality - in comparison to the bulk that you can buy for pennies (or even less) per disk ??

Weird, usually cd players do better with slower burn speeds (more burn time spent on each pit). I would first try a friend's burner then go buy a bunch of different cdr brands (mainly try different colors including 'black') and see if your player has a preference. I had a DVD player that would not read blue/green disks. Also make sure you are burning 'audio' discs and not 'data' discs with wav files, that would do the error message thing. You could try a software cd-rom in the cd4 and see if you get the same message.

If I were you I and on a budget, I would add a sub first then maybe go for a Halo amp down the road.

Cheers

The burned disks consist of jazz and rock- legally downloaded, I might add, from emusic.com. Any other suggestions ?

If your CD4-SE had the IEC power cord socket, then try a better power cord first. An $80 Blue Circle BC61 would be a good choice. Even a fatter standard 14-3/14awg cord from the hardware/electrical store would be better.

What kind of music code are you putting of the CDR's?