I did an experiment with two different pressings of the same album. The album is the famous Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. Since I own many variations of this album, it's easy to test differences between generations of releases. I have just completed a test between two CD pressings. One is the 1992 Capital release, CDP 0777 7 46001 2 5 and the other is the MFSL Original Master Recording pressing (don't know the exact date). It is the ULTRADISC pressing, the original done in Japan. Both albums are completely scratchless.

MFSL pressing

Capital pressing

Now, my question is: Are the lower errors from the MFSL pressing the result of more careful pressing, or the result of the taboo "better reflectivity" of the gold Ultradisc? I was really suprised at how bad the Capital pressing is. Maybe it's just my copy...

Hi. I may be quite ignorant in these matters but I have a question to ask you. Is the Nero CD/DVD Speed utility a reliable tool to check the quality of pressed disks? I am sure you could use them on burnt CDs/DVDs but presses discs are a different story. I have never heard of anyone conducting tests in this manner. So, if the reliability of the testing tool itself is questionable, so are the test results.
I guess the only sure-shot method of conducting tests in pressed CDs is to extract the tracks using EAC and see if you get any suspicious positions or errors. You can even do a "Test and Copy" and see of the two CRC values match. If they do, then I guess you have nothing to worry about. "Track Quality" may also be an indicator but there are reports of a bug in EAC that often reports a track quality of less than 100% at the end of the track when EAC shifts from one track to another.
I understand that this method of testing is slower than using Nero CD/DVD Speed, but it may provide reliable results. Bye.

The Capital pressing is well within the red book error standards (except for the single C2 error which should not state a problem since it should be corrected during playback) so you shouldn't worry too much about it (I have seen much worse original brand-new audio discs).

But backing up to a lossless format can never be wrong if you can afford the storage space ;-)

The MFSL pressing seems to be better on the specific drive you tested with but that does not necessarily imply reproducability.

I don't see any reason as to why the Nero CD/DVD Speed utility would not be adequate to test the readability of any CD, be it pressed or burned. It's testing whether or not it detects read errors. Testing for read errors should be the same on a pressed or burnt CD.



I might test on other drives to see if I can get reproduceable results.

Might wanna try KProbe2 with liteon drives.

Dreamliner77

Is that a frewware program ? and do you have a link for it

Yes. KProbe does not cost anything. The Big KProbe2 Thread (@ CDFreaks)

I wonder what the errors would be if the discs were tested at a speed closer to that of a CD player (with over-sampling).

tec

Not really. To get reliable results, one should use calibrated hardware, which costs much more than a CD ROM drive. C1 tests with CD SPeed, Kprobe, or Plextools can nonetheless exhibit obvious flaws in some CD. I'm not sure that the difference betweent he two CD above falls within the reliability of CD ROM drive based C1 tests, so reproduce the result with other drives, and also one or two other speeds (1x, 8x, for example) would be useful.



EAC is of no help for quality tests, it only reports C2 or CU errors, that is 0 and 1 these two cases.



If the error rate is within Red Book specifications, the C2 error rate should theoretically be 1 per hour. So I'm not sure if one C2 error in a CD is a violation of the red book.

Yes, but the album is only some 40 Minutes long ...

Hi Chang.
I believe I've mentioned on one or more previous threads that of the MFSL discs I've ripped, I cannot recall an instance of an extraction by EAC getting less than 100% "quality" on all tracks. This is rarely if ever the case for me in the same drive with normally pressed, (Aluminum) brand-new CD's. Of course this is largely irrelevant for getting the actual data off because the extractions are still okay, but it is an interesting observation.

I am not certain this is a result of pressing technique or better QC testing after pressing. Nonetheless, I have observed perfect extractions (from EAC) on every UDII disc I can recall ripping, regardless of it's manufacturing date. If this proves to be a contentious issue I can rerip a dozen or more of them to reverify, but I do not believe it is likely to be a sampling error.

I also have observed this as well. I've ripped about 4 Ultradiscs and they all extract 100% correct with EAC. I'm going to try to test the two discs I tested in other drives. I re-tested them using KProbe on the same drive at max and 8x speeds. Here are the links:

DSofM Capital Max Speed Extraction

DSofM Capital 8x Speed Extraction

DSofM MFSL UDCD Max Speed Extraction

DSofM MFSL UDCD 8x Speed Extraction

Results are similar for both 8x speeds and max read speeds. Also KProbe reports much the same consistent results for my Lite-On drive as did Nero CD/DVD speed.

Just curious. Is this the SACD version of DSOTM? If so, how can I fugure out which pressing the disc is? Thanks.

Then we can say that it violates the Red Book specs with a probability of guessing p=0.67

April, 1988.
(UDCD-517)



http://www.mofi.com/goldcd.htm
http://www.aurealm.com/orange.htm

Is anyone intersted in this(thread above)? This question is for Pio actually. Now the sentiment is (around here) that the MFSL UltraDiscs wouldn't have any advantage over a regular CD. MoFi praises their better fidelity and such, but could we say that the MoFi gold discs are better when it comes to read errors? I could test about 3 more MoFi vs mainstream release to see if I can repeat the results. My thinking is it was a better controlled pressing process rather than advantages of the gold disc.


EDIT: Punctuation

I, for one, would be very interested in the results of such a test.