What is the best CD-R media to use?
A number of companies and industry groups have done tests and concluded various things including, essentially, that they are all good so it doesn’t really matter. This is nonsense to anyone who, like many of us, has thrown away an entire spindle of discs because such a high percentage of them were tracking poorly on old CD players, causing trouble during playback (even on the drive that burned them), and so on. To complicate matters, most brands don’t manufacture their own blanks, meaning that even if you buy a good spindle once, there is no guarantee the next apparently identical spindle will be fine. One brand stands out, however, as consistently the best in terms of BLER (BLock Error Rates), Longevity (based on so-called “Accelerated Aging” tests), and compatibility: MAM, a division of Mitsui. Their silver discs are often used by audio, video, and other professionals requiring high performance, and their gold discs are often used by professionals for archival purposes. But MAM-A dis
