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Page 5 - Conclusion

Personal Opinions:

My initial impression of these discs was a little dubious, especially having just completed the review on the similar Verbatim "Digital Vinyl" media. However in the end, this media surpassed my expectations, and even managed to perform fairly well in almost all of my low speed tests. The only real bothersome thing about this media is that it has even LESS space for marking on then the Verbatim "Digital Vinyl" discs, which didn't exactly have that much space either! Technically Speaking: I'm sure you're wondering why these discs CONSTANTLY produce C2 error spikes when tested at high speeds, right? well here's why: You know those little circular grooves on the top of this media? the grooves that make the CD-R look like a vinyl record? well those little grooves make it very hard for the disc to be spun very fast, and remain perfectly balanced. When I was testing this media, everytime a C2 spike occurred, the drive had to slow down the spinning dramatically, most likely because the media itself was becoming unstable internally. I took the liberty of running extensive amounts of tests on these discs, trying to find out at what speeds these discs could be read at without them becoming unstable. After about 5 straight hours of testing, re-testing, software de-bugging, and then indexing, I have found that reading this media any faster then 24x will usually cause instability in the media, with a read error and drive slowdown as the result. Having said this, I would like to include that burning this media faster then 24x would also not be recommended, as it would probably result in a very stylish looking coaster! The Score: I give this media an 8/10. It performed well at its' certified speed, although the C1 error rates could have been a little lower on the low speed tests. Given the nature of this media I am not holding the C2 spikes in the high speed tests against it, especially since 99% of the time this media will be used for audio CDs, which are not generally read at speeds greater then 24x.

Sincerely, The Digital Dolphin