by Seagoat on Wed Apr 21, 2004 3:41 pm
Dear Halycon,
I did not post my qualifications or equipment for my prior post. I generally post at Steve Hoffmans' site. I would not recommend use of the Memorex/Pro-Disc for non-standalone audio burner use for several reasons. However, as to the Alesis Masterlink, it has been confirmed that the Black Memorex is superior, possibly based only on its black polycarbonate color, for burning audio discs. We used three masters and now 20 copies are identical. Not so with TY and Mitsuis where it is still hit and miss. Whether or not jitter burning problems are the reason the Memorex works, we don't know. Alesis top engineers could not determine why all of our burners inconsistenly burned identical copies; however, we determined it was the media. Any Ritek discs were very inconsistent and we stopped using it years ago.
Memorex is NOT recommended for archival use. It has a thin, black painted top layer rather than the superior diamond coat of Mitsuis. I'm sure it will last 20 years, but 100 years, who knows? I know that Twaiwanese Pro-Disc does not have the quality control of Mitsui or TY and we may get a bad batch in the future. For audio burning in our Masterlinks, its superior in consistency and sound quality to anything else we've tried (and Kevin Gray has tried about everything available in L.A.).
As to playback equipment, Steve Hoffman uses an Sony SCD 777, Kevin Gray (Cohearent Audio/RTI/Acoustech) uses a Sony 707esd in the studio and 620es at home and has Proceed D/A converters in the studio, I have most of the mid to late 80's Sonys as well (not stock units and played with reverse polarity, line conditioned and voltage regulated-otherwise mediocre), my friends have the Sony 9000 used as a transport with Proceed and Camelot D/A converters, etc. Steve also uses two Ampex 300s at home. We have custom built audio equipment, including voltage regulated push pull 120 monoblock tube amps, subminiature based line, phono and phono step-up stages and high end analog gear (VPIs mostly and a few Sotas).
It is interesting that since 1999, I have had no bad burns on my computer using TDK/Ritek for office use (preliminary drafts), Mitsui and TY for archival use (photos, reports, data). I've burned about 4,000 discs in the last five years. Before that, I had problems with Memorex and Sonys but it could have been the burners. Now I only use Plextor and Lite-On burners with superb results (and Nero burning software for everything but audio).
P.S. The former HHB Mitsuis and current Quantegy Mitsuis are all similar to Mitsuis. MAM ownership has not changed the factory standards per several retail sources and of course the company denies any quality changes.
I wanted to write my comments to this forum because it is one of the few that mentioned the Memorex discs. We are going to purchase 100s of them and make sure that they are still ProDisc type 9s. Companies like TDK and Memorex change their buyers frequently and you can't trust that each time you buy a spindle it is the same product.